


Twigleg's Diary

by TempleCloud



Series: The Adventures of Twigleg [1]
Category: Drachenreiter | Dragon Rider - Cornelia Funke, Toby Alone - Timothee de Fombelle
Genre: Adoption, Angst with a Happy Ending, Communication, Fairies, Friendship, Gen, Kobolds, Past Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-03
Updated: 2020-06-05
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:40:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 33,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24526267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TempleCloud/pseuds/TempleCloud
Summary: Set between Dragon Rider and A Griffin's Feather.  Ben and Twigleg get used to being part of the Greenbloom household - along with six kobolds and a horde of fairies.  While Ben is at school, Twigleg begins exploring the garden, and discovers a race of tiny people from whose point of view Twigleg is a giant - and who need his help.
Series: The Adventures of Twigleg [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1772449
Kudos: 1





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Out of the frying pan](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4294323) by [Evilkat23](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Evilkat23/pseuds/Evilkat23). 
  * Inspired by [One wild ride](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8383087) by [Evilkat23](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Evilkat23/pseuds/Evilkat23). 
  * Inspired by [Let Me Talk](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/716750) by Evilkat23. 
  * Inspired by [Into The Fire](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/716752) by Evilkat23. 



> I do not own Drachenreiter, because Cornelia Funke does. I do not own Toby Alone, because Timothee de Fombelle does. I do not own the characters Ivan Newlands and his family, and Atticus Noel and his family, because they are additions to the Dragon Rider universe created by my friend, Evilkat23. However, I have used Evilkat's OCs, and the timing of Ben's first encounters with them, rather differently from the way Evilkat does.
> 
> Atticus's partner, Zenith, does not appear in this story. This is because, at the point where I wrote the Twigleg's Diary series, Evilkat was reconsidering what to do with Zenith, and I didn't want to bring him into the story until she had decided.

_Editor’s note – this diary, written in tiny writing and in 16 th-century Gothic calligraphy, was found in the basement of a house in North-West England in 2017, shortly after the inhabitants, a pair of German academics who had been living in England with their two children, moved to Norway. The early entries are bilingual, with a diary entry written down the left-hand page in languages ranging from Early New High German (the language of the Lutheran Bible) to Latin, Ancient Greek, Urdu, Hebrew, and Arabic. On each right-hand facing page would be an English translation, often written in a confused mixture of Shakespearian English, Chaucerian English and Anglo-Saxon, sprinkled with modern words such as ‘internet’. To avoid embarrassment to the author, we have translated the document into modern English throughout._

Hamburg, Monday 10th August 2015:

I have decided to choose an English name.

Perhaps I am just overreacting to something that happened on the journey to Europe. It took sixteen hours to travel from Pakistan to here, I think, though it’s hard to be sure when the days and nights are in such different places.

When Professor Greenbloom and his wife (actually, I think she’s a Professor, too, of art history – I don’t know whether English has a feminine form of ‘Professor’, but I’ll think of her as the Professora) – anyway, when they explained that we would be flying home in an aeroplane, I felt puzzled and terrified. Puzzled, because I didn’t see how four humans could possibly fit in an aeroplane; and terrified, because even a flight of a few minutes with Lola is enough to turn my stomach inside out. It seems horribly ungrateful to write this about a good friend, especially one who has saved my life, but she doesn’t really believe that not everyone finds sudden dives and rolls and loop-the-loops as much fun as she does. I don’t want to tell her that, personally, I think aeroplanes are nearly as horrible a form of transport as ravens, and much more uncomfortable than dragons.

Human aeroplanes, though, are another matter. They are like great long buildings, with rows and rows of seats inside them, and they’re so enclosed that it’s possible to forget that you’re flying at all, especially if you’re hiding inside someone’s pocket. I wondered whether I ought to hide in a rucksack, but the Professor explained that bags have to go through an X-ray machine, which is something that can see through canvas and layers of clothing to anything hard, like the skeleton of a person hiding inside a sock. So instead, I crouched inside my Master’s jacket pocket, and if anyone wondered why he was wearing a jacket in the hot Pakistan summer, nobody said anything.

The Professor and Professora say that they need to put all my Master’s clothes through a washing-machine (which seems to be some sort of robot washerwoman), and then decide what needs to go to a charity shop, and what needs to go to fabric recycling. I hope they let me keep one item unwashed, so that I can breathe in the smell of my Master when he isn’t there. At the moment, I’m curled up in the jumper that got torn in numerous places when he had to escape through the side of the Roc’s nest. I hope the charity shop doesn’t want it.

I’m not sure what a charity shop is. I know that ‘charity’ is English for divine love, but I don’t see how you can buy love in a shop. Over three hundred years ago, after my brothers were killed, I began researching all the religions I could learn about. I read that Christians believe that God is love, and that humans are made in God’s image and should love as God loves. I wondered why they didn’t. The only human I had ever met, who was presumably made in God’s image and who had made us in the image of humans, didn’t love anyone. When my brothers were alive, we had loved each other, but who was there for me to love now? I knew Christians believed you should love your enemies, but I couldn’t imagine loving Nettlebrand. The only way I could survive was to refuse to feel anything, grief or love or hope or pity, and let my heart grow as cold and still as a hibernating lizard, until I didn’t know any more whether it was alive or dead.

And then, finally, it woke up. I met someone who showed me what the ancient writers meant about the love that is patient and kind, that keeps no record of wrongs, and that always protects, always trusts, always hopes, and always perseveres. He protected me, and it made me want to protect him. He trusted me, and so I wanted to become trustworthy. He doesn’t want me to think of him as my Master, but he is the only person who can help me to become the person I need to be.

I am writing this by torchlight, in a hotel bedroom in Hamburg, while my Master, and Miss Guinevere who is (we hope) about to become his sister, are asleep. The Professor and Professora, who are (we hope) going to be his parents, are in the room next door. We’re all trying to rest, before the tension of what happens tomorrow. But I’m so anxious that I can’t sleep. Tomorrow…

No, I can’t even write about it. I’ll write about minor worries first, and edge my way up to the big one. Next on the list: my name.

There was a play on the aeroplane. I’d never seen a play being acted before, but I’d read some, in the castle where I was created. This one wasn’t being acted by actors who were on the aeroplane with us. Humans have some kind of spell to record a play so that they can show it on a screen at any time. I suppose it’s not so different from recording words by writing them down in a book.

The play was about a man who seemed very like the alchemist who created me and Nettlebrand. In the story, he creates a monster – not an artificial dragon like Nettlebrand, but an artificial human made of bits of dead people sewn together. When the monster is brought to life, it turns out to be evil, and lurches around attacking people. It wasn’t a very good play, but I couldn’t stop myself peering out of my Master’s pocket to see what was happening. It reminded me of home.

Miss Guinevere said (apparently to my Master, but she intended me to hear, too) that it wasn’t like the book – that in the book, the Creature isn’t an evil monster. He’s just sad and lonely, because his creator abandoned him as soon as he was switched on, and all the people he tries to make friends with also run away from him, because he’s so big and ugly. There’s a bit in the book where the Creature explains how he had briefly become friends with a blind man, but when the man’s family came in and saw what the person he had been chatting to looked like, they screamed. The Creature asks his creator, Dr Frankenstein, to build him a wife so that he doesn’t have to be always alone; but when Frankenstein refuses, the Creature goes mad with despair and loneliness, and murders Frankenstein’s girlfriend and his family so that he’ll know how it feels to be alone.

The Professor said (apparently to my Master and Miss Guinevere, but again, making sure that I could hear) that it’s terrible to be that isolated, but that it’s a good thing that, in real life, so many people manage to cope with loneliness without becoming murderers, and eventually find someone to love. All the same, he said, that didn’t excuse Dr Frankenstein’s cruelty. He said that being literate means knowing that ‘Frankenstein’ was not the monster, but being intelligent means knowing that, actually, he was.

But then he added something else, just as an aside: that while ‘Frankenstein’ is a perfectly normal German name, to English people it always sounds like something from a horror story. That made me wonder whether my own name, Fliegenbein, sounds similar enough to have the same effect. I don’t want people who meet me to start worrying about whether I’m going to go mad with grief over being the last of my species and turn into a serial killer.

I could just use the English translation, Fly-leg. We all chose insect names for ourselves, because we were created from spiders or insects, but sometimes we used other names as well, depending on what mood we were in. So [Beetling was also called Crimson, because of his dark red hair, and Stick-Insect was just Sticks, for short](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10093447/1/Twigleg-s-Story), and [Flea was also called Mizell](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/4522554/1/The-Other-Homunculus).

Of course, these were just the names we used amongst ourselves. Nettlebrand sometimes randomly called us all ‘Oi, spider-shanks!’ but more often just ‘armour-cleaner’ or ‘hey, you!’ The alchemist, when he experimented on use, referred to us in his notes as H1, H2, etc. My label is H12. It is branded onto my back, just below the shoulder-blades.

That is my first memory: one huge hand lifting me from the jar and holding me still while the other pressed something against my back that made me gasp with pain, and so I started breathing. Then the hand set me down on a shelf with eleven other people like me, all newly-decanted and naked, and all with fresh scars on their backs. Some were whimpering, others trying to be tough and stoical. We couldn’t hug without irritating each other’s wounds, but we could squeeze each other’s hands reassuringly, and promise: we are family. Together till the end.

Anyway, there’s no point thinking about all that now. I’ve got a new family, and I’m choosing a new name. When we arrived at the hotel, we saw an English tourist in the foyer eating snacks out of a packet labelled ‘Twiglets’. So I might rename myself Twigleg, when we reach England, unless I can think of a better idea by then.

But first, we have to get there.


	2. Chapter 2

Hamburg, Tuesday 11th August 2015

When the Professor and Professora asked my Master if he wanted to come and live with them, I think we both assumed we would be going home with them straightaway. They live in England, which isn’t far from Scotland, where Sorrel and Firedrake come from.

When Professor Greenbloom asked my Master where he had come from, so that they could go there and ask to adopt him, Master said he had run away from the orphanage years ago and was never going back. I think he was frightened that the orphanage might want to keep him, or send him to live with another family. I imagined how I would feel if someone had told me to go back to Nettlebrand.

The Professor said that adopting a human child wasn’t as simple as taking in a homeless fairy or hobgoblin, or a homunculus for that matter. If he suddenly turned up at Manchester Airport with a twelve-year-old boy who spoke only German and had no passport or identification, and explained that he had met this boy in Egypt and then again in Pakistan and had decided to take him home and keep him, people would wonder what was going on. ‘They’d wonder whether I was kidnapping you, and whether I was planning to keep you as a slave,’ he said. ‘The police would try to find out who you are and take you back anyway.’

‘Well, why do I need to go by plane?’ my Master asked. ‘Firedrake needs to fly back to Scotland anyway, so I could ride on him, and then walk to your house, and you could “find” me outside your front door. And if people ask me questions, I can pretend I’ve lost my memory.’

‘I could crouch inside the hood of your jacket, Young Master,’ I said. ‘Then, if you need to ask directions, I can translate for you.’ Admittedly, it hadn’t worked too well in the fishing village, but I thought we just needed more practice.

‘It’s tempting,’ said the Professor, shaking his head, ‘but you’d probably be locked up for being an illegal immigrant. If you’re going to go to school or register with a doctor or have any kind of normal life, we really will need papers to prove who you are. Otherwise, what are you going to do? Live in hiding in my house, and never go outside?’

‘Fliegenbein’s going to have to live like that anyway, so why shouldn’t I?’ said my Master. ‘Anyway, why do I have to go to school?’

‘Yes!’ said Miss Guinevere, to her father. ‘You and mum could teach us at home. So could Fliegenbein – couldn’t you?’ she asked, turning to me.

I couldn’t think of anything to say. It sounded almost blasphemous. Humans are my masters, not the other way round. And yet – I knew many things that these children didn’t, at least about ancient languages. Then again, considering that I had spent most of my life in a derelict castle in the mountains, they probably knew far more things that I didn’t. Maybe we could take it in turns to teach each other.

‘I learn more when we’re travelling around looking for pegasi and gorgons than I do at school,’ Miss Guinevere went on, ‘and if I didn’t go to school, we wouldn’t have to worry about fitting it around term-times.’

‘You’ve got to admit, she’s got a point,’ said the Professora.

‘I know,’ said the Professor. ‘I think it’s an excellent idea. But until your mum and I can afford to leave our jobs, _we_ need to be in school. We’ll try to find a way to make it work, but – I can’t promise anything.’

Eventually, my Master agreed to tell his new parents where the orphanage in Hamburg was that he lived in, from when his parents were killed in a car crash when he was three years old, until he ran away at the age of ten. So, today, we went there.

By the time I’d finished writing last night’s diary entry, everyone was waking up, and I felt so ill with worry and exhaustion that I wanted to fall asleep. The Professora had asked for breakfast to be sent up to our rooms, so that I didn’t have to hide away while the humans ate in the dining-room, but when the tray of bread rolls, cheese, eggs, pickles, jam, yoghurt, orange juice and coffee arrived, I couldn’t face eating anything anyway. My Master said that if I didn’t feel in the mood for human food, there were some woodlice in the bathroom, but I didn’t even want woodlice right then. He looked even more worried about me than I was about him, so I let him feed me some yoghurt off the tip of his spoon. It was delicious, and made me realise that I was hungry after all. By the end of breakfast, we all felt properly awake and alive.

We all got washed and dressed. My Master lifted me into the washbasin in the bathroom, showed me how to turn on the taps to have a bath, and waited outside the door until I called to say that I’d finished, once I’d rubbed myself dry with a flannel and got dressed. I was glad he didn’t see me naked. I wouldn’t have wanted him to see my scars. Also, once I had checked that water ran smoothly down the plughole, it gave me a chance to use it for another purpose – not very elegant, but at least it wasn’t as dangerous as balancing on the edge of the lavatory seat, and I did run some more water to make sure the washbasin was properly rinsed afterwards. Living in modern human buildings is a lot more complicated than camping, where nobody minds if you just go behind a clump of grass.

When I was dressed and ready, I climbed down my Master’s jacket and into his pocket, and we set off. The staff at the orphanage wanted to talk to my Master separately from the Greenbloom family, to find out what he really wanted. They weren’t the ogres he had made them sound like, but they did ask some awkward questions about what he had been doing since he ran away. 

He was a bit evasive about how he had made a living to start with, except mentioning that he had ‘done a paper round’ for a while. Apparently children in Europe aren’t allowed to work, so my Master must have been either working illegally, or [supporting himself by doing something else illegal](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/5441273/1/The-Ballad-of-Ben). As someone who has spent four hundred years working for a dragon-eating, man-eating, livestock-eating, everyone-eating monster, I’m not criticising. We survive whatever way we can.

As for the next part of the story, he told as much of the truth as was possible without mentioning dragons. The old factory he was living in had been demolished, but he had made friends with some travellers, and were looking for somewhere new to live, and so he’d gone along with them. Where had they come from? Scotland, he thought. Yes, he could understand what they said. No, he couldn’t describe what they looked like – they were just people, friends. Where had they gone? Egypt first, then Arabia and then across the sea and into Pakistan. No, they hadn’t discussed religion much, but he didn’t think they were Muslims. He thought they believed in reincarnation, so they might be Hindus or Buddhists. They’d stayed in a Buddhist temple along the way. No, he didn’t know why they had been deported from Britain – maybe they just didn’t have the right papers. Where were they now? They’d decided to live with relatives somewhere up in the mountains, he didn’t know where exactly, but he’d decided to live with Professor Greenbloom and his family. No, the travellers hadn’t talked to him about being a martyr, or giving his life for a cause, or anything like that. No, they hadn’t given him anything to take with him. Was there any reason he was wearing a jacket on such a warm day, and kept it on indoors? Not really, he just liked the feel of it. Did he have anything in his pockets? No. Was it all right if they had a look?

I was trying to keep still, but at that moment I must have flinched. The woman who had been asking most of the questions, while her colleague took notes, said, ‘Is there something _alive_ in your pocket?’ reached in, and drew me out. She stared at me, wondering whether to be frightened or amused. ‘Is this your toy robot?’ she asked.

‘He’s my friend,’ said my Master, my best friend ever (except for my brothers, and they’re dead). ‘His name’s Fliegenbein.’ I stayed very still, trying to look like a robot, which wasn’t easy without knowing what a robot looks like, except that I’ve been accused of being one before.

‘Did anyone give you this to look after?’

‘No! I found him, when we stopped in Egypt.’ (Which was true.) ‘I couldn’t find his owner anywhere, so I thought I might as well keep him.’ 

This was also partly true. Nettlebrand hadn’t been in Egypt when we were. But he had come there shortly afterwards, to try to kill Professor Greenbloom. Which had been my fault. And up until this moment it had never even occurred to me to feel guilty about having betrayed a man who had shown nothing but kindness to me. I’d decided to rebel against Nettlebrand when I realised he wanted to kill Ben, but I wouldn’t have been at all bothered about his eating Sorrel, or Firedrake, or Professor Greenbloom, or everyone in the world. And Firedrake and the Professor had been kind to me, just as Ben had, and the only reason Sorrel hated me was because she loved Firedrake and wanted to protect him and she knew that I was a threat to him, just as I hated Nettlebrand because I loved Ben and wanted to protect him and knew that Nettlebrand was a threat to him, which meant that Sorrel was just as right to hate me as I was to hate Nettlebrand, because I was a disgusting cowardly vermin who didn’t deserve to be loved by anyone…

Probably the worst time to have a moral realisation that makes you simultaneously want to cry and want to beat yourself up, is when you’re pretending to be a robot. Fortunately, the woman was holding me by the collar of my jacket, so that Ben, my Master, was the only person who could see my expression. ‘Can I have him back?’ he asked. ‘Only,’ – he gave an embarrassed smile – ‘I don’t usually like to show him to people. Just in case the other kids tease me about playing with dolls.’ As the woman handed me back, he whispered to me, ‘sorry about that.’ He made a show of folding me up as if I really was a jointed doll – thighs against body, calves against thighs, arms folded across my chest – and slipped me back into his pocket. I snuggled against the warmth of his body, dried my eyes on the lining of his pocket, and told myself to postpone being seized by paroxysms of guilt until later.

The questioning woman asked my Master a few more questions about how he felt about the Professor and Professora and Miss Guinevere, and then the older woman, who had been taking notes, spoke.

‘Well, Ben,’ she said, ‘I can see that you’re excited about having a family, but we might need a bit longer to find out whether the Greenblooms are the right people to be parents for you – and whether you’re ready to be part of a family. After all, when you were living with a foster family before, it didn’t exactly work out, did it? You ran away, after all.’

‘If you put me with another foster family, I’ll run away again. And if you try to keep me here, I’ll run away.’

‘Then if we let Mr and Mrs Greenbloom adopt you, how do we know you won’t run away from them? How do _you_ know you won’t?’ 

My Master was silent for once.

‘How about this for a deal? We’ll find a foster carer for you to stay with for a few months – _not_ Mr Faulwetter again, I know you didn’t like him – just so that you can prove you’re able to live as part of a family, do as grown-ups tell you, go to bed at the right time, and so on. In the meantime, we’ll find out a bit more about the Greenblooms, and help them learn a bit more about being adoptive parents, and they can come to visit you at weekends. In between, you can talk to them on the phone, or on Skype. And then, if all goes well, you might be able to move in with them at Christmas, or even at the autumn holiday. Do you think you could manage that?’

For a while, my Master was still silent, but I could guess that he was wishing he had flown to Scotland with Firedrake and Maia, or stayed with Shimmertail in the Rim of Heaven, or joined the monastery, or done _anything_ but come here. At last, though, he said quietly, ‘All right.’ He lifted me from his pocket, still folded into a neat package. In truth, I tend to hunch up like that anyway, when I’m sad or frightened, to make myself into the smallest shape I can. Being 12cm tall, instead of 22cm counting my hair, makes for a smaller target.

‘Fliegenbein,’ he said quietly, ‘if I have to go to a foster family, or back into the orphanage, please will you stay with Barnabas and Vita and Guinevere for now? Only it might not be safe for you here – other kids might give you a hard time.’

He held me very close to his ear, so that the two women assumed he was just being a child playing a game, and couldn’t hear me whisper, ‘Yes, Young Master.’

‘That’s – probably a good idea,’ said the younger woman, while the older one made another note. ‘After all, you don’t need imaginary friends so much when you’ve got real, human friends, do you?’

‘I’ve got real friends,’ said my Master firmly, as he eased me back into his pocket. He left his hand inside the pocket long enough for me to hug it goodbye. I wanted to cling on forever, but instead I gave it a quick squeeze and let go, and waited for him to withdraw it before I started to cry again and wiped my eyes on my sleeve.

The orphanage staff said they needed to talk to different foster carers to see whether anyone had any space, and asked us to go away and come back at 5pm. So we went out. The Professora asked my Master whether he wanted to show us around the canals, if they hired a rowing-boat. But my Master said that he’d rather do something that he couldn’t afford to do when he lived here, and please could we go to the summer funfair? 

So we did. Roller-coaster rides seem to be designed to give the sensation of leaving your stomach behind as you swoop through the air at peculiar angles, without the excuse of needing to escape from a terrifying monster. And the Haunted House was truly horrible, even if I knew that its ghosts and mummies were only pretend, and that I’d faced worse monsters in real life. There had also been several real ghosts in the alchemist’s castle, but I’d never found them frightening, or even particularly interesting. Vampires are a different matter. I’ve read about them, but never met one, and [I only hope I never do – or, even more importantly, that my Master never does](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4294323/chapters/9729945).

Then there was the Klaus Störtebeker Pirate Village, which has harbour inns and, for some reason, face-painting stands, balloon artists, and trampolines. Admittedly, the only time I’ve been sailing was on a sea-serpent, but from the stories she told about pirate ships she had sunk, I didn’t get the impression that pirates were interested in trampolining or making balloon animals.

When we arrived back at the orphanage, the manager explained that she had been ringing around all the foster carers on their books, and none were available: either they didn’t have any vacancies, or they only took pre-school children, or they didn’t feel they could cope with a twelve-year-old street child with a pattern of running away. ‘And we don’t have any room here, either,’ she said. ‘So – I’ve been doing some background checks on the references you gave me. I understand you were approved as potential adopters a few years ago, when you were living in Heidelberg?’

The Professor and Professora agreed that they were.

‘As far as I can see from the records that have been emailed to me, the only reason you weren’t able to adopt the child you applied for then, was that the adoption agency felt you travelled too much to provide a consistent environment for a toddler,’ said the manager. ‘But with Ben, you might be just the people to ensure that he doesn’t get too bored. And he certainly seems to feel comfortable with you – enough to trust you with his most treasured, ah, “friend”.’ She smiled the way adults do when they don’t believe something a child is telling them – the way the Professor had done at first when Miss Guinevere told him she had seen Nettlebrand.

‘So,’ the manager concluded, ‘I’d usually prefer to take things more slowly, but there’s a lot of pressure on our services, particularly with so many refugees coming into the country from the Middle East and North Africa. Ben must have been about the only European to try to go in the other direction!’ She laughed. ‘Anyway, I can approve you to foster Ben for now, and you can apply formally to adopt him when you’ve had time to get to know each other better. If you come in tomorrow, there are a few more forms to fill in – all right, a lot more – and I can give you the documents you need to get your new son a passport. But in the meantime, I suggest you all go back to your hotel and get some rest.’

So we did. When we got outside, my Master slipped his hand into his pocket, one finger extended to give my hand what is apparently called a ‘high-five’. Then he asked hopefully, ‘After we’ve had some rest, can we go back to the funfair and see the fireworks?’


	3. Chapter 3

Manchester, Monday 24th August 2015

We’re finally home. The ‘few more forms to fill in’ managed to take up nearly another two weeks, in which we had time to see most of Hamburg. The Professor and Professora explained that they didn’t have much money, so couldn’t do things like going to the funfair every day. We did visit art museums, a darkened museum where blind guides lead the blindfolded, and a park full of different kinds of garden. But we also went to much more exotic places, like a room full of magic machines that wash and dry clothes all by themselves, and a huge house full of all kinds of food, called Aldi. We needed to buy food here so that we could make sandwiches, because (again) it cost too much money to eat in the hotel or at restaurants all the time. I had thought that money was something only evil humans cared about – the sort of people who hunt down dragons in the hope of making gold from their horns – but it seems that normal humans worry about it, not because they want to have a great deal of money, but just because they can’t afford to waste what they do have.

We bought enough for our needs for the time being, and bought some delicious biscuits called Choco Leibniz (named after a famous mathematician, but no-one knows why) as a treat to take home with us. I noticed, though, that several times the Professor got out a machine called a laptop computer, opened it, and sent a message to a shop in England, telling them to deliver a package of milk, yoghurt, and ice-cream to his house. I asked why, and he smiled and said, ‘You’ll see when you get home.’

As soon as we arrived, six excited kobolds came bounding up to the Professor, all trying to be heard at once: ‘You’ve done the right thing adopting that Dragon-Rider kid, but why did you have to bring a homunculus home with you as well?’ ‘Barnabas, it’s not fair, the humans are building two more churches, a mosque, and a synagogue, how’s a decent pagan hobgoblin supposed to get any peace?’ ‘Hob ripped my jeans, tell him he can’t have any milk!’ ‘It was an accident, and those jeans look stupid anyway!’ ‘Robbie kept playing his mouth-harp all night, all the time you were away!’ ‘Lobber wouldn’t water the garden, and he ate _all_ the Stilton and the Cornish Yarg before we could get to them!’

The Professor dealt with them as best he could: ‘Thank you, Billy, I’m glad you approve of Ben, but Twigleg is a part of my family too, for as long as he chooses to be, and I expect you to treat him with the same respect you’d show any of us. Bwbach, if ministers can put up with you, you can put up with them. Hob, you’ve got no right to torment Blue just because he likes wearing clothes. I’m not going to starve you, but you don’t get any yoghurt or ice-cream until Blue is satisfied that you’re sorry. Blue, I could tell Hob to mend your jeans, but maybe you’d rather do it yourself if you want them to stay a wearable shape. Robbie, what did I tell you about noise? And Lobber, what did I tell _you_ about sharing the food fairly?’

Robbie, Hob, and Lobber mumbled, ‘Sorry!’ but Billy continued to glare at me, his fur standing on end.

‘You didn’t tell me there were kobolds here!’ I groaned.

‘Brownies,’ the Professora corrected me.

‘Uh – do you mean “brownies” is the English for kobolds, or do you mean these aren’t kobolds, they’re brownies?’

‘Well, some English people call all the species in the group brownies, and some Germans call them all kobolds, but there are several different species,’ said the Professor. ‘Our friends here are the sort who live in houses, who are called brownies or hobgoblins. They’re usually very helpful, but it’s important not to insult them or hurt their feelings, for example by giving them clothes – except those who happen to like clothes, like Blue, of course. Then there are forest kobolds like Sorrel, and you’ve met the dubidai, of course, up in the Himalayas. Most ships used to have at least one klabautermann…’

‘The sea-serpent told us about them!’ interrupted my Master.

‘Ah, yes, she’d be old enough to remember. They’re becoming rarer now, because they don’t feel as comfortable on modern ships as on sailing-ships. Then, of course, there are the knockers, who live in the mines. I’ve never met one of those to talk to, but several times they’ve saved my life by knocking to warn of danger. Sometimes they’re accused of tricking humans into mining poisonous ores, but I’d say it’s more likely to be a misunderstanding, where the miners misheard the signal for “Get away!” as “Lots of gold here, come and help yourself!” And my grandparents used to have a farm in Norway, where there were a family of nisses living in the barn. They look a bit more human – like little old men with red caps and long white beards – but still with cat-like eyes and pointed ears. I remember one of them throwing a tantrum because my grandmother brought him his breakfast porridge with the butter underneath, instead of melted into the top the way he wanted it.’

‘I don’t blame him!’ muttered Robbie.

I wondered why it was that kobolds can get whatever they want just by being bratty, when four hundred years of being polite and obedient hadn’t got me anywhere. ‘So,’ I said, ‘this house contains six brownies, four humans, and one homunculus. Is there anyone else I should know about?’

‘Only the fairies!’ said Guinevere. ‘I always leave the bedroom window open so they can come in. They like playing with my old toys, like the dolls’ house, and when I’m home I put honey in the bowls for them. Do you want to come up and meet them?’

‘You’ve got fairies here? Cool!’ My Master, I remembered, had been the only one of us who actually liked the fluttering little pests who had done their best to get us lost on our way through Arabia. I rolled my eyes.

Blue, who seemed the least obnoxious of the brownies, smiled sympathetically. ‘They party till all hours, fairies,’ he said. ‘It’s worse than Robbie’s music. _And_ Lobber’s snoring.’

‘You snore worse!’ retorted Lobber.

‘No I don’t!’ protested Blue. ‘I never get the chance to go to sleep!’

I looked pleadingly at the Professor. ‘You _did_ say I could sleep in the basement, didn’t you?’

‘Yes, if you’d like to. It used to be a separate bedsit, but at the moment it’s mostly full of books and files. I’m sure we can make some space, though.’

So the Professor, my Master, and I went down to have a look at the basement. The wooden steps leading to it aren’t as broken as the stone staircases in the castle, so they aren’t full of handholds to scramble up, but I can manage by putting my hands on the top of each step and pushing up. It’ll help me stay fit – it’s terribly easy to become lazy when there’s always someone willing to carry me around. This place is also drier than the castle, because there’s a machine that collects water from the air and drops it into a bucket, as the basement has to be kept dry to protect all the books and papers down here. 

Just to be on the safe side, though, I’ve made up my bed of my Master’s old pullover on a table next to a bookcase, and my Master nailed a strip of wood from the other end of the bookcase to the stairs, so that I can get out if there’s ever a flood. Miss Guinevere was very shocked to find out that I didn’t know how to swim. She’s loved swimming ever since she was a baby, and she’s offered to teach me in the bathtub. She said that if she ran the water to only 15cm deep at the deep end, I’d be able to stand up if necessary, and that it’s best to know how to swim, just in case. I said I’d think about it. What I think is that I don’t want to go anywhere near any body of water larger than a washbasin.

I know that part of this is an irrational fear, because water still reminds me of Nettlebrand, even though I know that all that remains of him is a melted pile of armour, and a toad who has gone back to [living a normal amphibian life](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/6877252/1/Dragon-Rider-2-The-Return-of-Nettlebrand). It doesn’t have to remember being Nettlebrand any more, but I don’t know how long it will be before I stop having nightmares about him. I suppose memories are what make us people, in the same way that a tree is made up of all the dead layers of all the trees it has ever been throughout its life, under the thin layer of living wood that is the tree’s ‘now’.

There isn’t a bath down here, but, as it was once a flat, there is a shower-room off to one side with a loo and washbasin. Obviously I don’t need a human-sized shower, but my Master tied pieces of knotted string to the washbasin taps and the loo seat, to make rope-ladders so that I can climb up to them, and an extension string to the cord that switches the light on and off.

Most of the basement is full of bookshelves, full of far more books than were in the alchemist’s library – and these are just the overflow for the ones that didn’t fit on the ground floor and first floor. It’s like being surrounded by a forest of books. It seems such a long time since, just a few months ago, I could creep into the alchemist’s library only when Nettlebrand wasn’t yelling for me to polish his scales or file his claws or tell him the story of his heroic deeds. _This_ library is somewhere where I’m actually allowed to be, where I’ve got a table holding almost everything I could possibly need: my bed, my diary and a piece of pencil-lead, a torch, and the book I’m currently reading. 

I’ve realised that I need to improve my grasp of colloquial modern English, and reading modern books is a start – though admittedly, at the moment I’m reading an ancient Norse manuscript and comparing it with a modern English translation which Professor Greenbloom made and published under a pseudonym. The original dates from the days before dragons decided to hide away from humans. When the translations were released to the public, most people assumed that they were just modern stories made up to amuse children – but, as the Professor says, if they help their readers understand why the dragons went away, and why friendship between humans and dragons is possible, there might be more hope for the world in the next generation. This book is the memoir a young Viking boy who has to pass his initiation rite by catching and training his first baby dragon – and discovers that, whatever everyone tells him, yelling at the dragonet isn’t very effective.

I don’t know whether my Master would enjoy this book, or whether he’d be indignant at the whole idea of keeping dragons like dogs. I wish we were reading this book together, or taking it in turns to read it out loud to each other – after all, we both need to practise! This is the first time since Egypt that I’ve settled down to sleep without being near enough to him to be lulled to sleep by the sound of his breathing – whether that meant stowing away in his rucksack when I was sent to spy on them, or sleeping pillowed on his hand or held safe in his lap once I was an accepted member of the group, or in the hotel bedroom in Germany when we were waiting for all the paperwork to be sorted out. It seems strange to be alone again, just when I’d got used to being not-alone again after the 348 years since my brothers were killed.

This is ridiculous! My brothers may be dead, but I’ve got a good friend who’s just up a couple of flights of stairs, and there’s no reason I couldn’t go up to him now and say I’ve changed my mind about the basement. It’s just that sharing a room with two humans _and_ six brownies and a flock of partying fairies is a bit further from alone-ness than I want to go right now. Anyway, my Master is probably asleep by now.

Anyway, I’ll see him tomorrow.


	4. Chapter 4

Manchester, Sunday 6th September 2015

Today was the last day before the school term for my Master and Miss Guinevere. The university where the Professor and Professora teach does not begin its term for another month, though in three weeks, something called Freshers' Week will happen. They have explained that this is a time when all the new students come to learn their way around the town by drinking a pint of beer in every ale-house in the town in turn, writing their names on each other's shirts, and vomiting, and that I shouldn't worry if things get noisy.

Twelve-year-olds, however, are not expected to take part in this ritual (indeed, the water here is so safe that it is not the custom for boys or maidens under eighteen to drink beer). So our preparations for school have mainly involved trying to find a school which had a place for my Master, and shopping.

Until a few months ago, I hadn't encountered any humans except the alchemist who made me, and I didn't know any females until I met Sorrel, and then the sea-serpent, Dr Ghalib, Professora Greenbloom, Miss Guinevere, Lola, and Firedrake's new friend Maia. But as far as I could find out from human books, young male and female humans generally lived separate lives, with boys going to school while maidens stayed at home learning to spin wool, weave cloth, and grind corn.

Now, though, it seems that young humans of both sexes go to the same schools and learn together, whether they are studying physics, cookery, woodwork, or sex itself. (It seems logical, particularly this last; after all, when they grow up and marry each other, they will need to understand how each other's bodies work. And I will probably never find anyone to marry.) The only times they are separated are when relieving themselves, and when changing their clothes to play a game called football or soccer, and washing the mud off afterwards.

There are over twenty schools in this town for youths between eleven and eighteen, but fortunately the one Miss Guinevere goes to has a space for my Master. They are in the same 'tutor group', which is the class in which children meet first thing in the morning, but there are several classes in every year, and as my Master has missed several years of schooling, he is likely to be in different 'set' groups from Miss Guinevere for most subjects, at least at first. Language is also a difficulty. For some reason, most schools teach in the language of whatever country they happen to be in, rather than in Latin. My Master had studied some English in school between the ages of six and ten (so he is better off than an English child would be in Germany, as most English children don't learn any foreign languages before the age of eleven), but, having after running away from his foster-home and school two years ago, he has had time to forget. I wondered whether I could be of some help in translating.

I asked my Master whether he could smuggle me into school in his new schoolbag, which smells very soulless and plasticky compared to his battered old rucksack. After all, I had ridden in it when we had gone to buy school uniforms, pens that carry their own ink supply, and a machine a little smaller than I am which can do sums to save its owner the trouble of doing them. So could I, of course, though the machine is rather faster at calculating square roots than I am.

My Master looked tempted, but also worried. 'Are you sure you want to? It'll just mean more hiding away, all day. I mean, climbing out and introducing yourself to everyone worked out okay in the fishing village, but – well, it might not have.'

'No, Young Master, I won't do that again,' I promised. 'Only I want to find out what a school is like. I want to understand the lessons, so that I can help you study. And – I just want to be with you.'

The Professora looked at me oddly. 'For the past couple of weeks, you've almost been in hiding here,' she said. 'Is everything all right?'

'Of course it is, Madame,' I said firmly. 'You've been very kind to me, and I'm truly grateful to you for letting me share your home.'

'But that's just it!' she said. 'In Hamburg, you shared everything with us, even though you had to stay out of sight of strangers. But since we've come home, apart from one swimming lesson in the bath, you've spent most of your time in the basement, either reading or exploring the internet on Barnabas's smartphone that he didn't want. You catch your own meals instead of eating with us. You seem glad to spend time with Ben when he goes down to see you, but you never want to come up to his bedroom. Obviously, you're welcome to your privacy, but – well, is there something about this house that makes you feel uncomfortable?'

I resisted the urge to shout, 'It's full of brownies!' Instead, I said, 'No, no, everything's fine. I suppose I've just got used to being alone, over the centuries.'

'Understood,' she said, though she didn't look entirely convinced. 'But if you'd like to spend some time being not alone, would you mind helping to sew name-tapes into some of these uniforms? I've asked Ben and Guinevere to do most of their own, but if you help them, it'll get done sooner, and it's not the sort of job brownies like.'

'I'd be delighted to help,' I said, and I truly was glad to have something useful to do. I can sew very neatly, even with a needle the length of my forearm – after all, I've been making and mending my own clothes for hundreds of years.

As we worked, the two children chatted. I didn't say much, but just by being with them, I could feel myself thawing out, the way a hibernating lizard thaws when the first rays of spring sunlight touch it. Being lonely when you don't have any friends is as inescapable as starving when you don't have any food, but being lonely because you refuse to go and see your friends is just laziness, and, like mental or physical laziness, it can all too easily become a habit.

We haven't settled for certain whether I am to accompany my Master to school tomorrow, or let him go there first and decide whether it's safe. We've agreed to sleep on it, and decide in the morning.

Only, down here on my own, I can't sleep. I've been playing Tetris on the phone, but even that can't relax me tonight. The thought of going into a school of a thousand teenagers who could, potentially, be even worse than six brownies, is frightening as well as exciting. But I have to admit that, if loneliness feels bad, then being lonely in the middle of a crowd could be the worst of all.

Monday 7th September 2015

After writing that last entry, I realised that I was not only anxious and lonely, but also hungry, so I decided to go out to the garden to see if I could catch a moth.

The back door here has what was originally a cat-flap, but is now a brownie-flap. One thing I hadn't known about brownies is that not only do they have rather catlike faces and claws, but this sort at least can take on the form of cats when they choose. Obviously, it makes it easier for them to avoid notice if visitors don't see six furry, talking humanoids, but just six ordinary moggies, and it means they can go into the garden, or down the street to tease neighbouring dogs, when they choose. Also, they are formidable enough fighters to deter any real cats from setting paw in this garden.

Other predators, however, do.

As I stepped out through the brownie-flap, I heard a small, tinkling scream above my head, and then a cloud of twinkling, fluttery things launched themselves at the place where the scream had come from. A tawny owl opened his beak to give a hoot of astonishment, dropping the victim he had seized, who plummeted through the air to land in the grass in a tangle of shimmering wings and silver dust.

'Are you all right?' I asked.

'No, I'm half left,' replied the fairy, in Elven. Fairies can speak Universal just as well as dragons and brownies, but they generally only bother when they want to lie to people. Amongst themselves, the local flock of fairies speak a British dialect of Elven, which is slightly different from the version spoken in the Alps, but near enough for me to follow.

'Are you okay?' I repeated, in Elven this time.

'Oh, 'ell!' groaned the fairy. 'Oh, E'm hurting! Oh, N-O! Oh, pee off, will you?'

She stood up, and tried to fly off, but it was no use. One wing was torn and hanging helplessly from her back.

I winced, imagining how she must feel, and tried to remember where the medical supplies were kept. Once, centuries before, my arm had been badly mauled by a rat, and the wound turned septic. At that time, my brothers and I had reason to be glad the alchemist had used us for experimenting on, as he had left meticulous records. We knew which moulds made poultices that could ward off infection, and what dosage of which preparation of willow-bark was strong enough to take away pain and fever, but not strong enough to be poisonous. Even so, I was ill for a long time, and my brothers Spinner and Dragonfly cared for me patiently. Afterwards, it was several years before I fully recovered the use of my right arm, so Bumble and Beetling took over much of my share of the work. I had been so lucky to have a family I could rely on – and all this fairy had was a flock of silly fairies.

They were hovering around her now, giggling to each other: 'What's wrong with Bryony?' – 'Bryony can't fly-on-ee!' – 'Pick her up, let's try-on-ee!'

They swarmed forward to grab their injured sister, but I stood in their way. 'Wait!' I said. 'Please…'

That just made them giggle again: 'Please, breeze, freeze the cheese, in the trees. Easy peasy, Japanesey, lemon-squeezy…'

'Shut up!' I shouted. This startled them so much that they actually did fall silent for a moment. 'Now,' I continued, 'can two of you go to the cardboard-recycling box, and find a piece of cardboard small enough to fit through the brownie-flap, but big enough for Bryony to lie on…'

That set them off giggling again. 'I'm not a lion, I'm a fairy!' said Bryony weakly.

'For Bryony to lie-on-ee,' chanted another.

'Listen!' I shouted again, as this seemed to be the only way to get their attention. 'Bryony could lose her wing if we're not careful! I need the rest of you to go to the bathroom cabinet and fetch the…'

I realised I didn't know which substances were safe for fairies. For all I knew, the big bottle of disinfectant might dissolve Bryony's wing, even if between us we could manage to open the bottle and pour from it. On the other hand, the antiseptic cream should be safe, as the fairies were always flying into the bathroom to smear their faces with blobs of various types of goo and play 'Guess who I am!'

'Just bring me the blue tubes with white writing on, and put them on the kitchen table,' I said. Fairies can't read English, so I had to accept that, along with the antiseptic, I was also going to get mouth ulcer gel, haemorrhoid ointment, and toothpaste.

Just then, a paw planted itself on my shoulder. I turned, and found myself facing a huge ginger tomcat. For a moment I was seized by panic, and then reminded myself that of course this wasn't a real cat, but Billy. This did not seem much of an improvement.

'What do you think you're up to, then?' he growled.

'Trying to organise these fairies,' I said. 'One of them's hurt, and I need the first aid kit. I can't fly, but they can.'

Billy laughed. 'Trying to organise _fairies_? You don't think you could use the help of someone a bit bigger?'

'The humans need their sleep. The children have school tomorrow, so I'm trying to deal with this without disturbing anyone.'

Billy purred. 'Hey, you know the score! Humans give us food and a good home, so we pay our way by helping them. Just don't overdo it,' he added. 'We make it a rule to do one good turn each per day. More than that, and the humans start taking you for granted.'

'Why would I want to limit my helpfulness?' I asked indignantly. 'This is the first time I've had a Master I can love and respect, so…'

Billy hissed. 'Master! That's the way dogs think. Brownies don't have masters!'

'Well, homunculi do,' I retorted. Then I realised: he's willing to be helpful. Why am I arguing with him?

'Do you mean you could help?' I asked. 'Could you reach the bathroom cabinet?' Billy is big – over a metre tall in brownie form – but I remembered the cabinet as being too high for anyone except an adult human to reach it.

'Not me, but I reckon Lobber could.' Billy bounded in through the brownie-flap, and a minute later stood upright, holding the door wide open. He switched on the light in the kitchen, fetched a piece of card and helped me lift Bryony onto it, and hoisted her onto the table. Next, he grabbed me with one paw, padded upstairs to the children's bedroom, and batted at the ball of black fur curled up on Miss Guinevere's bed. 'Lobber, you lazy git, wake up and give us a paw, will you?'

'Don't look at me!' growled Lobber. 'I've _done_ my good turn – I helped put the shopping away.'

'Yeah, you put most of the Wensleydale away in you. Come on, it's past midnight – this can be Monday's good turn. One of the flutterbyes is hurt, and we need someone who can get the first aid box down. Reckon you can manage that?'

'Hmmm – at a stretch.' Lobber jumped down from the bed, yawned and stretched, and went on stretching, until he bumped his pointed ears on the ceiling. Embarrassed, he smoothed his fur and shrank down to a little under two metres, then fetched the first aid box and set it and me down on the kitchen table. 'Can I go back to bed now?' he asked.

'Well – there's just one more thing.' I needed something sterile to wash Bryony's wounds. 'Please could you boil the kettle and then pour a little water from it into a saucer?' Lobber looked dubious, so I added, 'It could be your good turn for Tuesday. If you get them both done now, it'll leave much more time for sleeping.'

As sleeping, whether on a human's bed by night or in any patch of sunlight during the day, is Lobber's favourite activity, he accepted this, only muttering, 'Thuffering thuccotash!' When the boiled water was cooling in the saucer, Lobber went back upstairs to sleep, and Billy went out to taunt the Rottweiler down the road, which, he felt, needed a bit more excitement in its life.

The fairies, with only a modicum of silliness, fetched me a roll of Sellotape and some Blu-tak from the living-room, another piece of card from the recycling box, and a pair of scissors small enough for me to use from the bathroom. They were intended for cutting human fingernails, and had curved blades, but it was better than trying to cut with a pair of scissors bigger than I am. I cut two pieces of sterile dressing with padding, the size of Bryony's wing, and two pieces of card slightly larger. Then I set to work on cleaning and dressing the wound.

I am ridiculously squeamish and probably the worst person in a medical emergency. Dragonfly and Mizell would have been confident and professional in a situation like this but they weren't here, and I was. So I concentrated on cleaning Bryony's torn wing with pieces of cotton-wool dipped in the boiled water, and then spreading antiseptic cream on it, without hurting her more than I could avoid or dislodging her delicate wing-scales, and without fainting or being sick.

When I had finished, I assembled the cardboard cast around the dressings, with balls of Blu-tak to keep the pieces of card apart, and Sellotape to hold them together. Bryony pouted. 'It's too heavy,' she grumbled. 'I can't move.'

'That's the point,' I explained. 'It's to make sure you keep still until your wing has had time to heal.' I pulled out a great mass of cotton-wool to cushion the wing. 'The family will find you and look after you when they come down to breakfast,' I told her. 'It's best if you get some sleep now.' I was starting to feel very weary myself. I called to the other fairies, who were now buzzing around the cupboards, trying to unscrew the lid from the honey-jar. 'Excuse me! Do you think you could sprinkle some sleep-dust on Bryony?'

The cloud of fairies whirled around, knocking the kettle over, which knocked the saucer, which fell onto the tiled floor and smashed. The fairies, after sprinkling their magic dust over their wounded sister, hastily flew off through the open window. I pushed the Sellotape off the table, slid down the table-leg after it, and began looking for old newspapers to wrap the broken pieces of crockery before anyone got hurt. But before I had time to parcel it all up with the Sellotape, let alone mop the floor, Professor Greenbloom had come downstairs and was staring at the mess.

'Twigleg, what are you…?' he began. I didn't take in the rest. Playing it back, I think it included the words 'You could have been killed!' and 'Why didn't you call me?' At the time, though, all that registered was that a big person was talking to me about the puddle on the floor, which was definitely my fault, which meant that I was in trouble and deserved to be punished.

The Professor crouched down so that he could make eye contact with me. I kept my head lowered so that he couldn't, and went on clearing up. When I had finished, I said, 'I think I need to be on my own now,' and scuttled past him, down the stairs and into the basement. Not to my cosy nest on the table next to a bookshelf, but to a cupboard at the far end.

The alchemist didn't often punish us physically, at least once we had noticed that nothing he did to chastise us when we disobeyed was likely to be anywhere near as painful as the experiments he carried out on us whether we broke the rules or not. But he soon realised that, as we depended on each other for reassurance, the most severe punishment he could inflict was to take one of us and place him in a dark, sound-proof, smell-proof box. It didn't matter which of us he chose, as the other eleven would suffer nearly as much, waiting without knowing how many hours or days or weeks it would be before our brother was returned to us, or how ill he would be by then, or whether this time the alchemist would leave him until he died.

This cupboard was the nearest equivalent I could find to the punishment box. I lay curled up on the floor and cried until I fell asleep.

I dreamed that my brothers were comforting me after a session in the isolation box, calling me back to myself. I woke to find that there was indeed someone calling me, but it was a human.

'Twigleg? My dear Fliegenbein? Are you all right? Where are you?' It was the Professor. I emerged from the cupboard and crossed the basement floor to him. He was kneeling on the floor, with a hand held out so that, if I wished, I could run up his arm and onto his shoulder. I stood back. There was only one person whose arm I would have run up at that moment, and then only maybe.

'G-good morning, sir. What time is it?' I managed finally.

'Nearly lunchtime. Ben and Guinevere were disappointed not to see you before they went to school, but I explained that you'd been working very hard through the night and you needed a rest. We're all very grateful for what you've done for Bryony, and of course the children were cooing over her. We've made up a bed for her in a shoebox and gave her some honey and she slept most of the morning, but she's awake now, and asking for you.'

'I'm very sorry about…' I tried to think what I was apologising for, and settled on 'last night.'

'Whatever for? You did a wonderful job, and you were extremely resourceful. I was startled at first, and then worried in case you'd been putting yourself in danger, but I realise now how patronising it was of me to think you couldn't cope. But all the same – you do realise you're allowed to ask for help, don't you?'

'Uh, well, the other fairies helped, and Billy and Lobber,' I said. 'What did Bryony want to see me about?'

'Oh, just bored and lonely, I think. The rest of the fairies have gone out. Do you want a lift upstairs, or would you rather walk?'

'It's quicker if you take me,' I said, and climbed onto the Professor's hand.

Bryony was lying in her shoebox with a handkerchief for a blanket. When I entered, she glanced up at me and said, 'Tell me a story,' in imperious tones so like Nettlebrand that I almost burst out laughing at the incongruity.

I started to tell the story of how I had been sent to spy on Firedrake and ended up joining his side, but Bryony said, 'No, silly, not a boring true story about dragons. Tell me a story about an elephant. That one there.'

She gestured to a book which, I later found out, had belonged to Miss Guinevere since she was four years old, about an elephant who befriends a planetary civilisation living on a dust mote. It was a poem, and translating poetry from English into Elven was enough of a challenge to keep me interested. By the time I had finished, we were both tired enough to go back to sleep for the rest of the afternoon.


	5. Chapter 5

Monday 7th September 2015 continued

I woke up when I heard my Master and Miss Guinevere arriving home from school, and slid down the leg of the bedside table and started lowering myself down the stairs to join them. By the time I was on the third step from the top, my Master had reached me and held out his hand so that I could run up his arm.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked, and ‘Is Bryony all right?’ asked Miss Guinevere.

‘Yes to both,’ I said. ‘But she’s sleeping now. How was school?’

‘Well, nothing tried to eat me,’ said my Master. ‘Seriously, it was okay, just – not very exciting, compared to flying on a dragon.’

‘Did you manage to find your way around?’ asked Miss Guinevere.

‘Yeah, the map they handed out in tutor time was so easy to use, I don’t think even Sorrel could have got it wrong! I got into an argument with a boy in my Maths class called Ivan, when we were both trying to find the Maths room on the first floor, because I said that meant it was the first floor _above_ the ground floor, and Ivan said that in English it meant the ground floor. Ivan was trying to make a bet with me that whoever was wrong had to wear a dress, but then a green-haired boy called Atticus came along and pointed us upstairs. Ivan’s new as well, but he’s from America, so I didn’t think he’d have more trouble with the language than me!’

‘What about Atticus? Is he new, too?’ asked Miss Guinevere. ‘I haven’t seen anyone with green hair at our school before. Is it naturally green, or dyed?’

‘What? Nobody has naturally green hair!’

‘Dad’s friend Tallemaja does. It’s because she’s a huldra, a forest spirit. Maybe Atticus is, too.’

‘No, I don’t think so. I think he’s just – what are the older students who don’t have to wear uniform called?’

‘Sixth-formers.’

‘But – aren’t we in Year Eight?’

‘That’s right. It goes: Year Seven, Year Eight, Year Nine, Year Ten, Year Eleven, Lower Sixth Form, Upper Sixth Form.’

My Master gave me a ‘Can you make any sense of this?’ look. I shrugged.

‘Anyway, we’d better change out of our uniforms,’ said Miss Guinevere. ‘Do you want bathroom or bedroom?’

‘Bedroom, please.’

So my Master changed in the bedroom (quietly, so as not to wake Bryony), while Miss Guinevere went into the bathroom to exchange her school skirt and blouse for jeans and a tee-shirt. The social worker who comes to visit to check on how my Master is settling in seems worried about the idea of a brother and sister sharing a bedroom. I don’t know why it’s so shocking – after all, my brothers and I slept on a shelf of the laboratory without even the privacy of a bathroom to get dressed in, and Firedrake says that once the Himalayan dragons have all been restored to life and the Scottish ones have reached the Rim of Heaven, they’re going to have to sleep several families to a cave. But humans don’t seem to think that anyone except a husband and wife should be allowed to sleep together, particularly boys and girls. Maybe if I hadn’t claimed the basement as my territory, my Master and I could have decided to share it. At least we’re the same sex, if not the same species – and humans seem much more worried about sharing with someone of the same species, than letting a cat sleep on their bed.

We played in the garden for a while, and then came in to sit at (or in my case, on) the kitchen table and make a start on homework. The Professora was already there, putting together a presentation on Buddhist art on her laptop, as it was the Professor’s turn to cook dinner, with Bwbach standing on a stool to help him peel onions.

I had hoped to be able to help my Master with his homework, but when he opened the first textbook, I just found myself blinking in confusion. ‘What’s a “solar system”?’ I asked.

‘Well, it just means the way the planets go round the sun. The teacher wants me to write a menonic, I mean mnemonic – that means a sentence for remembering what order they go in. The one I learned at my old school was “ _Mein Vater Erklärt Mir Jeden Sonntag Unsere Neun Planeten_ ,” (“My Father Explained to Me Every Sunday Our Nine Planets,”). I used to wonder what it would be like, having a father. But I can’t think of a good nenomic in English. Have you got any ideas?’

‘What’s it a mnemonic for?’ I asked.

‘The planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. Only the teacher says Pluto isn’t a real planet, because it’s too – well, _I_ think it counts! Don’t you?’

‘You’ve left out the Sun and Moon,’ I pointed out. I had never even heard of Uranus, Neptune or Pluto. Astronomy wasn’t my best subject, as it’s hard to climb up to a telescope set at human eye-level, let alone make sense of what you’re seeing while clinging with both hands to the eyepiece. Still, even I knew that the Moon was the nearest planet to Earth, followed by Mercury, Venus, the Sun, and then Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the fixed stars, and the _primum mobile_. I had once read a poetic allegory in which the poet imagined Heaven as a set of circles leading out from Earth, with the souls of the most saintly people in the circles furthest from Earth, and so nearest to God.

When I thought about it further, though, I remembered that my creator had owned books on the Pythagorean theory that the Earth and the Sun revolved around something called the Central Fire, and that there was a Counter-Earth on the other side of the Central Fire from Earth, which was why we could not see it. He had even had a modern book by someone called Nicolaus Copernicus, with a bizarre theory that the Earth went round the Sun, which sounded like the sort of thing that only an alchemist obsessed with gold and anything that shone like gold would believe.

‘Well, they’re not planets,’ my Master said. ‘The Moon goes round the Earth,’ (which I would have thought was the definition of a planet) ‘and the Earth and the other planets go round the Sun. And – do any of the other planets have moons, too?’

‘Oh, most of them, I think,’ said the Professor. ‘I can’t remember which has the most – why don’t you look it up? You’d better not interrupt what Vita’s doing – have you still got my phone?’

‘It’s down in the basement,’ I said, wondering how I was going to climb upstairs while carrying it. Instead, my Master jumped up and rushed downstairs to fetch the phone, returning a minute later. I opened a search engine and typed in, ‘Which planet has the most moons?’ The answer, it turned out, was Jupiter, with sixty-three known moons so far, followed by Saturn with sixty-one. Pluto, which is too small to be a planet (perhaps my Master hadn’t wanted to say that in case he hurt my feelings), has a moon called Charon nearly as large as itself, so that they orbit each other. 

So, did that mean the Sun was the true fixed point, the centre of the universe, after all, and that it only gives the illusion of rising and setting? I typed in ‘Does the Sun move?’

The answer that came up was a passage beginning: ‘Yes. The Sun and its solar system are part of the Milky Way galaxy, along with many other stars. The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy, consisting of a central bulge and four major arms, and everything in it orbits around the centre.’ I tried to look up how many stars there are in the Milky Way, but apparently there are so many that nobody knows how to count them – and there might be several hundred billion galaxies in the universe.

It’s like us, I thought, looking up at my Master as he peered over my shoulder at the phone screen. My life revolves around you, and your life revolves around a dragon, and he needs to be part of the whole flock of dragons who will soon be migrating from Scotland.

At any rate, the idea that the Earth isn’t just some little ball of mud with Hell at its core and Heaven outside it, but a true planet in the dance of the heavens, is so beautiful that the ancient poets would have given anything for it to be true. I asked how the Earth could be a planet, when it didn’t shine. Suddenly all four humans were busy arranging objects on the table to show how, when only the stars truly shine, planets and moons can reflect light to each other. 

Firedrake told me once that according to dragon tradition, silver dragons originally came from the Moon. If that’s true, maybe they flew by Earthlight when they lived there. But the books and websites we consulted say that there is no air on the Moon, so maybe the dragons couldn’t fly at all there, but simply leapt in long bounds, which must have been easier with the low gravity. Do dragons need to breathe? They snort and snuffle like any animal – and yet sometimes they seem to need nothing except light. It’s all a mystery. Apparently, humans have visited the Moon, and there don’t seem to be any dragons living there now – but perhaps they’re just good at keeping out of sight.

I always knew that I didn’t know much about the world, because I had hardly ever been allowed outside the castle where I was created, but at least I thought I was fairly knowledgeable about anything that could be learned from books. I hadn’t realised how much of what I thought I knew would turn out to be wrong. I don’t know whether to be ashamed of my ignorance, or excited that there is so much left to find out. It is as though my mind has been lying in the same position for so long that it had gone numb, and now, starting to flex its muscles again feels prickly – but the prickling is still better than the numbness.

What I don’t understand, though, is what reason the Professor and Professora could have to keep me, if I’m not as knowledgeable as I thought I was, and not big enough to be as much help with the housework as the brownies. I suppose it’s because I’m their son’s – friend, I suppose – he refuses to think of me as his servant – and they love him. Or even because they love me a bit? No, that doesn’t make sense. Only children have a right to be loved unconditionally, and I’ve never even been a child.

What can I do to be of use round here? Well – I can dress a fairy’s torn wing. I can translate books into Elven for her. It’s better than nothing, I suppose.

When the five of us had been discussing planets for about an hour, Bwbach said huffily, ‘Well, now that I’ve finished putting together the mushroom and onion casserole _on my own_ , do you want me to put it in the oven or not? And can I make myself some cheese on toast?’

‘Yes please, and of course you can,’ said the Professor. ‘I think we’ve still got some Cheddar left, if Lobber hasn’t got to it first.’

‘Don’t you want some of the casserole?’ I asked.

‘Nah, I can’t stand mushrooms,’ said Bwbach, sawing slices of bread to toast, while Lobber swaggered in and helped himself to a bowl of vanilla ice-cream from the freezer.

‘You don’t like them?’ I was astonished. I knew hobgoblins were a different species of brownie from Sorrel, but I didn’t realise they were _that_ different.

‘No, ice-cream goes best with brownies,’ said Lobber. ‘Hey, human, if you ever sell this house, you will tell the new humans to buy proper ice-cream, won’t you? And Greek yoghurt, not the sickly low-fat stuff?’

‘And butter, not marge,’ added Bwbach.

‘I can try,’ said the Professor, ‘but I’m afraid not many humans believe in brownies, these days. Or you could always come with us, if you prefer.’

‘Nah, it’s easier getting used to new humans than a new place,’ said Bwbach. ‘Even if they don’t think they believe in us to start with, we’ll soon get them trained.’

‘Do _you_ want to eat with us?’ my Master asked hopefully.

‘Yes, please,’ I said, realising how long it had been since we had had a meal together.

‘Even if it means eating off dolls’ house plates?’ asked Miss Guinevere.

‘As long as you promise to remember that I’m _not_ a doll,’ I said firmly.

‘Of course you’re not,’ said Miss Guinevere. ‘You’re a member of this family – if you want to be, I mean.’

‘You know, we still haven’t got round to doing the homework assignment,’ I said. ‘How about – uh – “My Various Theories May Just Supply Understandably Nervous Perplexity”?’

‘That’s brilliant!’ said my Master, writing it down. ‘And – do you want to come to school with us, tomorrow?’

I thought about it. ‘I’d like to come sometime, but not tomorrow. But I’d like you to tell me everything you’ve found out, when you get home.’

I don’t know why I decided that. Maybe it was cowardice – all right, probably most of it was. But it’s also that I was enjoying being sociable, and I didn’t want to go back to being someone who needs to hide away. I hadn’t really realised until last night that I don’t need to be afraid of the brownies in this house. After all, they don’t know anything about my past, so, unlike Sorrel, they don’t have any particular reason to hate me. Even in Billy’s case, his hiss is worse than his scratch. And fairies mostly aren’t dangerous, unless they’re leading you astray when you’re trying to get somewhere. Bryony isn’t too annoying as fairies go, and I’m looking forward to reading to her again tomorrow. Then, when she’s resting, I might find time to do some reading and studying on my own. Or to explore the garden.


	6. Chapter 6

Friday 11th September 2015

For the last few days, my life has settled into a pattern of coming upstairs to join the Greenbloom family for breakfast (usually with a brownie lapping milk out of a bowl and trying to look as if he or she isn’t really part of the family, just a lodger). Then, when my Master and Miss Guinevere have set off for school, I go upstairs to keep Bryony company. The other fairies sometimes come to visit her, but usually don’t stay long, as she isn’t much fun when she can’t fly with them. Generally, they bring her a blackberry, and then wander off to play with the dolls’ house furniture. However, she does like being read to. When I’m reading aloud, sometimes some of the other fairies fly nearer to listen, and even some of the brownies, pretending to be curled up asleep on the bunk beds, might twitch an ear in my direction.

Apart from Dr Seuss stories, I’ve found her a bestiary full of much stranger creatures than fairies and dragons: horse-headed fish of whom the males give birth to sea-foals; tardigrades, tiny animals who live in water but can go into suspended animation if dried out, and live like that for a hundred years until a drop of water revives them, and who won’t die even if you boil them or freeze them; octopuses, who can have sex by the male touching his arm to the female’s head, or even tearing off his arm and giving it to her; starfish, who can not only grow a new arm if you tear one off, but the arm can grow a new starfish; and far more. As Professor Greenbloom says, considering that humans know that these animals exist, it’s all the more baffling that most humans refuse to believe in dragons, or even in Loch Ness monsters or yetis, who don’t even attempt to conceal themselves.

In the afternoons, Bryony usually takes a rest, so until school is over, I either read to myself, or explore the house and the garden. Obviously, crossing a room on foot takes much longer than being carried, but then, the landscape looks so different from a height of a few centimetres rather than well over a metre off the ground that it’s like a different world.

Today, quite unexpectedly, I made a new friend. I had just sat down at the foot of the oak tree in the long grass at the bottom of the garden, and snapped my fingers around a passing fly, when I noticed that there was a boy standing next to me. He looked slightly older than my Master, but smaller. Much smaller, in fact – he was shorter than the smallest joint of my finger. If he hadn’t climbed up to the head of a dandelion that was about level with my head, I wouldn’t have noticed him at all.

He looked astonished and confused, as if he wasn’t quite sure what he was seeing. I couldn’t be sure whether he had registered my existence as a person at all. After all, I am much bigger compared to him than a human is compared to me.

The boy had unkempt blond hair, wore nothing except a ragged pair of shorts, and carried a blowpipe, presumably to hunt with. He looked decidedly thin and hungry, so I deposited my fly on the flower-head next to him. He stared at it, inspected it as if to make sure the meat was fresh – or perhaps checking that the fly hadn’t died of some disease. Then, he climbed over the flower and slid down its smooth green trunk to the ground.

I felt angry with myself for being so stupid. Of course he couldn’t eat a whole housefly! From my point of view, it was a snack, but as far as he was concerned, it was a vast behemoth like a badger. Even if he had the strength to carry it home to butcher it – and small beings can be phenomenally strong – he couldn’t have climbed down the dandelion stalk with the fly in his arms.

I waited to see what happened. The boy ran to where a clump of grass stalks were plaited together. I had seen these clumps before, but always just assumed that the grass fairies plaited them that way for fun. Now I realised that these were housing blocks where this boy’s entire tribe lived. He ran up one of the stalks, shouting out something in a high, chittering voice, in a language that I didn’t recognise. People came flooding out, with bags tied around their shoulders and knives tucked in their belts. They swarmed up the dandelion and shared out the insect between them, sawing off chunks of leg, head, abdomen, and thorax. Several of the older men slapped the boy on the back, congratulating him. He smiled in an embarrassed way, evidently not wanting to explain that he hadn’t personally brought down this beast, but – what? A giant had given it to him? Some strange force of nature too vast to comprehend had dropped it on his dandelion?

This boy whom I had met first looked strikingly different from his neighbours. He had a longer, leaner face, despite his youth, with a more pronounced nose than on his neighbours’ round, pale, rather flat faces. His hair was as wild and almost as yellow as the dandelion, while theirs was smooth and black.

Having caused so much excitement, I felt tempted to run back to the kitchen and fetch a piece of sugar for dessert. What humans call a ‘grain’ of sugar, and I think of as a lump, would be, for this boy, a large block that he could chip slabs off for every family in the neighbourhood. But somehow, it didn’t seem a good idea. It would be a way of showing off, underlining the fact that, even if I was a small, penniless giant living on the charity of some much bigger giants, I was still much richer than these people.

I watched them until they had disappeared into their houses, presumably to cook the meat or preserve it in some way. The blond-haired boy stayed the longest, calling out something in his own language, as loudly as he could – which still made it only a faint chittering to my ears, and would probably have been wholly inaudible to a human. What he was calling might have meant, ‘Thank you,’ but I wasn’t sure.

I didn’t see another of the hunting tribe for the rest of the day, so I went in to try and find out what I could about them. My first thought was to look in a book, until it occurred to me that it would make sense to start by asking the Professor and Professora whether they knew anything about tiny people. 

‘You mean other homunculi apart from you?’ said the Professora, sounding sympathetic.

I hadn’t, but I was curious. ‘ _Are_ there any others still surviving?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know. It’s possible, but you’re the first one I’ve ever met, and I don’t think Barnabas has met any others – or have you?’

The Professor sadly shook his head. ‘I’m afraid you’re almost certainly an endangered species, by now. All too many species are – but at least the creatures people will accept exist, like rhinos and tigers, can have some measure of protection – not that that stops poachers hunting them!’

‘Anyway, I wasn’t really asking about homunculi,’ I explained. ‘I meant people much, much smaller.’

‘Fairies? Impets? Nisses?’

‘People about two millimetres tall. Or maybe nearer one and a half millimetres,’ I explained. ‘I’ve just met some at the bottom of the garden.’

‘ _Seriously?_ ’ The two humans stared at me, fascinated. I explained about the fly, and the boy, and the group of people who had come out to divide up the meat.

‘So, do I take it this means you haven’t got round to having lunch yourself yet?’ asked the Professor.

‘I didn’t quite get round to it,’ I admitted. I had forgotten about being hungry, because I was so curious to see what happened.

‘If it comes to that, neither have we. Shall we have a bite to eat first, and then go and see whether these people are out and about?’

This seemed a good plan to me. But when we went out, with the Professor carrying me on his shoulder (and carefully stepping on the concrete path down the middle of the garden, where it would be easier to see these miniature people and avoid accidentally treading on them), there was no-one to be seen. Either they were very busy indoors, or the sound of human footsteps frightened them into staying hidden.

I spent the afternoon trying to do some research in the Professor’s books and on the internet. There was a huge amount of information about British fantastic beings alone, including the various British kobolds such as Scottish brownies, Welsh bwbach, Manx fenodyree, and English hobs; the silkies who look like women in silken gowns (not to be confused with the selkies, seal-women who can take on human form, and are sometimes kidnapped by humans and forced into marriage with them); the goat-like ùruisg, Scottish relatives of fauns and satyrs who live in streams and waterfalls; the Irish pookah, who can shape-shift into various kinds of animals; Irish fairy folk such as leprechauns, clurichauns, and far darrig; the pixies of south-west England who are the traditional enemies of fairies; and the nocturnal trows of the Shetland and Orkney islands who sometimes kidnap musicians. There were also rumours of Lilliputian communities, descendants of Lilliputian immigrants who had travelled to England in the 18th century. None of them were anywhere near as small as the people living in the grass.

When my Master and Miss Guinevere arrived home, I told them about the Grass People, and the three of us hurriedly (but carefully) crept down the path again, to see whether they had reappeared. They hadn’t – but there was a scrap of paper lying under the dandelion, barely weighed down by some tiny pieces of grit (heavy boulders, from the point of view of the Grass People). It was about the size of a postage stamp, and looked as though it had been torn from a stray sheet of newspaper that had blown in. On it was a drawing of the blond-haired boy and a younger boy and a pretty young woman of his tribe, with smiling faces. They were drawn larger than life, their faces as much as five millimetres across, which meant that the artist must have had to walk around his drawing, perhaps dragging whatever he was drawing with (a brush laden with mud?), or perhaps kneeling on the paper to rub pigment into it. At any rate, the faces of two of the round-faced people were very recognisable. The tousle-headed boy’s face was a less good likeness, perhaps because he had drawn the picture himself, and wasn’t as familiar with his own appearance as with that of his friends.

‘That’s a cool thank-you letter!’ my Master said. ‘They must like you a lot.’

‘Well, they liked the fly-meat, anyway,’ I said. ‘They haven’t had time to decide whether they like me yet.’

But if we manage to communicate, we might become friends. This evening, I drew a picture of myself, smiling, with one hand held out and the three Grass People sitting around on my hand, eating pieces of fly. I drew it as small as possible, on one corner of a very large (A5) sheet of paper. It’s a bit too dark to go out now, but tomorrow I could leave the paper down there, pasted to a piece of stiff card so that it’s hard enough to lean on, and with a thin stick of lead from a clutch-pencil so that the Grass people can add more drawings.

I don’t want just to bring more food. That’s what you do to entice an animal to become your pet, and I don’t want to treat these people like pets.

I want to be their friend.


	7. Chapter 7

Saturday 12th September 2015

It was pouring with rain today, so there was no sign of the Grass People. I didn’t think it would even be worth looking. After all, people that small could probably be drowned by a single drop of rain – or at the very least, it would create a film covering their entire bodies, so that they can’t breathe – so my guess is that they stay indoors on days like this. Still, Miss Guinevere wanted to look anyway, and my Master offered me a lift in his raincoat pocket, so that I wouldn’t get drenched.

‘You really ought to have waterproofs of your own, Twigleg,’ said Miss Guinevere worriedly. ‘And some warm clothes for when it starts to get cold. I could make you some, if you like.’

‘I’m used to being cold,’ I muttered. After all, I was created in a chilly castle in the mountains. I’m capable of fending for myself. All the same – it is wonderful to have to have people around who even care about whether I get cold or hungry. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I mean, it’s nice of you to offer, but I’d rather make my own clothes.’

‘We’ve got some lightweight waterproof cloth,’ offered Miss Guinevere. ‘Dad bought it ages ago to make tents and waterproof clothes, and we’ve still got some bits left. I hope you don’t mind that it’s emerald-green?’

‘That sounds beautiful,’ I said. She still looked disappointed at not being allowed to make anything for me, so I added, ‘If you know how to knit, I could really do with a warm jersey, as well. I can handle cutting and sewing, but human-sized knitting-needles are a bit much for me, I’m afraid.’

‘I can try,’ said Miss Guinevere. ‘We’ve got a textiles project in Technology until the end of October, so I can work on it in school. After half-term, we’re switching to woodwork.’

In the meantime, we went to look for the Grass People, didn’t find any of them venturing out, and went back to the house to have breakfast.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked. My Master was looking rather dejected.

‘Yeah, fine, just missing Firedrake – and feeling a bit bored and fed up. Well, shall we go into town today? Where do you want to go?’

I hadn’t really thought about it, partly because (a) I’m still not used to people asking me what I want, other than rhetorically, as in, ‘Get on with filing my claws – or do you want me to gobble you up like your brothers?’ (b) I don’t know enough about Manchester yet to know what I want to visit, and (c) the house and garden were still enough of a world waiting to be explored. But I did a quick internet search, and found out about a library with mediaeval illuminated manuscripts and fragments of papyrus from scrolls thousands of years old. My Master didn’t look all that enthusiastic, until I pointed out that it might have information about dragons – or about tiny people who live in the grass, for that matter.

‘Or there’s a museum with dinosaurs,’ I added, still scrolling down the list of options. I hadn’t heard of dinosaurs, but judging by the photographs of their skeletons, they seemed to be some kind of dragon.

We went to both. The library was in a building with a vaulted ceiling like the underside of a ship, and windows with pictures made of coloured glass. Apparently, it had been built to look like a Christian church. It looked quite different from the Buddhist monastery, but there was the same sense of wonder in here. This library contained lots of religious texts, mostly Christian or Jewish, from the first printed Bible back to ancient papyrus fragments of the Gospel of John, the Gospel of Mary, the Book of Tobit, and the Septuagint translation of the Torah. Mainly, though, I suppose the library was a temple to learning. I just wished I could climb out of my Master’s pocket and look through some of the books by myself. I caught myself thinking, ‘If I could live anywhere in the world, I’d like to live in a place like this,’ and then, ‘No, I wouldn’t. I want to live where my friends are.’ Being loved is worth more than all the books in the world.

The museum would have been more fun if it hadn’t made me wonder so much about humans, and how dangerous they really were. Admittedly, some of the exhibits were fossils of animals that had lived tens of millions of years before humans, such as ichthyosaurs and tyrannosauruses, or had died by accident, like a woolly mammoth who had been frozen in the ice for thousands of years. But there were also lots of animals who had obviously been killed and skinned or pickled by humans in order to display them in a museum. I wondered whether the man who caught Sorrel and me in Egypt would have skinned and stuffed us if we hadn’t escaped.

When we arrived home, I asked Professor Greenbloom about this. ‘Well, I’d planned to rescue both of you, but you very sensibly rescued each other,’ he said. ‘But if you hadn’t escaped – I don’t really know. A hundred years ago, that probably is what would have happened, but these days – well, sometimes I think my species is edging towards becoming civilised, and then I realise that we really, really aren’t. Take this newspaper – in the news section, there’s a feature about how appalling it is that even though rhinoceroses are a strictly protected species, people still hunt them because of stupid superstitions about their horns having medicinal properties. And then, in the magazine section, there’s an interview with an actress who talks about using rhinoceros-horn lotion as part of her daily beauty routine!

‘I’m sorry, this is turning into a bit of a rant,’ he added. ‘But in general – well, some people are starting to wake up to the idea that killing the first member of a species they encounter is probably a bad idea. A hundred years ago, someone who spotted an interesting flower or insect while out walking would probably kill it and put it in a glass case. Today, they’d take a snapshot on a mobile phone, look it up on the internet to find out what it was, maybe post copies on their Facebook page.

‘So, no, I don’t think Professor Rosenberg would have _killed_ you, if he could believe that you were alive at all, and not some sort of robot. But that isn’t to say that he wouldn’t have wanted to keep you in captivity while he studied you.’

‘I’d always been in captivity,’ I said. For all I know, Professor Rosenberg might not have treated me as badly as Nettlebrand, or the alchemist who made us, did.

I wonder if some people would say I’m still in captivity now? I know it seems to make my Master uncomfortable when I call him ‘Young Master’ instead of ‘Ben’, or call him ‘Ihr’ instead of ‘du’ when we’re speaking in German. Modern English seems to use ‘you’ instead of ‘thou’ for talking to anyone, irrespective of status – except that, bizarrely, some English people think that they should call God ‘Thou’, because they are used to 17th-century translations of the Bible that say ‘Thou’. Modern German, for a polite form of ‘you’ normally seems to use ‘Sie’ (which means ‘they’) instead of either ‘Ihr’ (‘you’) or ‘du’ (‘thou’). But I was brought up to be properly respectful to my superiors, and calling a human ‘du’ just seems disgracefully impertinent – even if he wants you to.

Anyway, I do think of Ben as my Master, but this is because I have chosen to be his slave, not because I was forced to be, and that makes all the difference. I know that if I wanted to leave, he’d let me go wherever I chose. I just can’t think of anywhere I’d want to be, other than with him.

I hope he doesn’t think this is weird.

Sunday 13th September 2015

My Master’s friend Ivan came to visit today, partly to play and partly to work on a project. My Master asked me whether I wanted to be introduced to Ivan, stay out of sight in the bedroom or the basement, or hide in his pocket so that I could hear the conversation. I said I’d rather stay in his jacket pocket (and at least the weather has turned cool enough that wearing a jacket indoors doesn’t look too odd). I was feeling curious about Ivan. He and my Master and Miss Guinevere are in the same class for Religious Studies, and they’d been told to get into groups to give a presentation on why some people believe in things that other people don’t, and debate whether it makes sense to believe in them. While other people had suggested topics like whether God exists, reincarnation, whether it’s wrong to eat meat, and whether it’s wrong to have sex before marriage, my Master had suggested, ‘Dragons’. Everyone had laughed at him, except Miss Guinevere, and Ivan, who had said, ‘Cool! Can I be in your group?’

So, after playing cards for a while, they got to work on writing a script for a sketch in which my Master plays himself, Miss Guinevere plays the eminent dracologist Dr Zubeida Ghalib, and Ivan plays a sceptical journalist who is interviewing them.

‘I didn’t think Religious Studies would be like this,’ Ivan said. ‘Public schools in America don’t teach religion, and I was going to ask if I could be excused because I’m not religious. But then I realised that it isn’t like they’re saying, “Believe in Jesus and the Virgin Birth and believe the world was created in one week or you’ll go to hell!” They’re just telling us about what different religions believe.’

‘It’s different in different countries,’ said Miss Guinevere. ‘We spent a year living in France, and the school I went to there didn’t teach RS either. In Turkey we were mainly studying Islam, but I was in primary school then, and I think Turkish schools go on to comparing other religions later on. In most of the rest of Europe it’s mainly Christian, but British schools try to fit in as many religions as possible. Last year we did Judaism, Sikhism, Rastafarianism, Taoism, and Buddhism.’

‘So, is it not too difficult, that they in dragons and dragon-riders believe will,’ [Editor’s note: English in original manuscript] said my Master, who is taking even longer to get the hang of English syntax than I am. Probably we ought to practise more at home – or at least read English books together. It’s easy not to bother, when everyone in this household speaks either German or Universal.

Ivan looked at him, fascinated. ‘You’ve ridden dragons?’

I wondered whether my Master would say, ‘Yes, all the way to the Himalayas,’ or, ‘No, silly, that’s just in the play.’ But Ivan hadn’t said incredulously, ‘You’ve _ridden_ dragons?’ or, ‘You’ve ridden _dragons_?’ It was more a cry of recognition: ‘ _You’ve_ ridden dragons?’

‘Have _you_?’ my Master asked.

‘Yeah, a couple of years ago. We were on vacation in a National Park, and I got lost – well, okay, I had a big fight with my brother. And my dad. Anyway, I decided to run away and live in a tree, like the kid in _My Side of the Mountain_ , yeah? Okay, I hadn’t thought it through, hadn’t brought anything to make fishing-hooks or a bow and arrow, but I figured my Hershey bars should last me a while. Well, I was miles into the forest when I met a bear – a grizzly. I tried throwing it the Hershey bars, but it finished them off and then came after me for its main course. I’d have been eaten, if a big blue dragon hadn’t gotten in between the bear and me. I thought he was going to grab me and fly off with me, but it was daytime and…

‘Only by moonlight can dragons fly,’ my Master completed the sentence.

‘You really _are_ a dragon-rider!’ Ivan beamed. ‘Anyway, Issiah – the dragon – asked me if I wanted to stay with him. It was tempting, but – well, my parents were still together in those days, and I knew mom’d be worrying about me. If it had been just dad and Josh, it might’ve been different. As it was, we waited until it was dark, and Issiah flew me back to the campsite. But before we set off, he gave me a present.’

Ivan rummaged in his jeans pocket and took out a wrapper smelling faintly of chocolate, and, more distinctly, of dragon. The label on it said, ‘Hershey’, a brand of chocolate bar I hadn’t seen before, and the traces of chocolate themselves smelled slightly different from British or German confectionery. Ivan unfolded the wrapper to reveal a bright blue scale.

‘Issiah said he wanted to give me this, as a way of keeping in touch,’ he explained. ‘He wanted to pull out a scale from his chest, so that when I held it, he’d feel my emotions as near to his heart as possible. But I didn’t want him to have a bald patch over his heart, where some hunter could shoot him, so he agreed to scratch a scale off his tail instead.’

‘He can feel your emotions?’ repeated Miss Guinevere.

‘Yeah – well, only when I’m holding it with it unwrapped,’ said Ivan. ‘Right now, he’s reading that I’m happy, because I’m hanging out with you guys and I’ve found out that I’m not the only dragon-rider in the world. But mostly, I keep it wrapped up, because if Issiah knew how I feel most of the time, living with my dad, he’d want to fly over and rescue me. And it’s not like you’ve got much really remote wilderness where he could hide, if he did come. I knew Britain was small, but I didn’t get how crowded it is, compared to America.’

‘England,’ said my Master. ‘Firedrake comes from Scotland, where it wilder is – but not wild enough.’

‘And you keep a dragon’s scale hidden in a _chocolate bar wrapper_?’ said Miss Guinevere incredulously.

‘Yeah – what do you expect me to do? If I bought a silver locket and hung it round my neck, dad or Josh would want to know what it was. In a candy bar wrapper – well, they know I’m a slob, my room’s knee-deep in candy bar wrappers, who’s gonna bother going through them in case one’s got something hidden inside? Though I haven’t seen Hershey bars in the stores round here, so they might wonder why I’ve hung onto the wrapper this long,’ he mused. ‘Maybe I should start using a potato chip bag instead. Walker’s potato crisps – frightfully British, doncherknow?’ he added in an upper-class English accent.

‘That’s more of a Received Pronunciation accent,’ I pointed out, climbing out of my Master’s pocket. ‘Walker’s crisps are made in Leicester, so they’d have a Midlands accent, more: “I was probably the least skilful player in the Italia 90 squad,”’ – mimicking a video clip I had heard of a football player talking about his career. One advantage to computers is that because they have speakers, they make it much easier to research the sounds of language and not just the written forms.

Ivan stared at me. He had ginger hair that was nearly as unkempt as mine, and green eyes.

‘You’re not the only one who hides interesting souvenirs in your pockets,’ I explained, crossing the living-room coffee-table to him. ‘My name’s Twigleg.’

‘You’ve got fairies here?’ exclaimed Ivan.

‘Well, yes, but they’re out in the garden – or probably sheltering in the bedrooms, in this weather,’ I explained. ‘I’m a homunculus. And there are brownies, too.’

‘Good – I’m _starving_!’ said Ivan. For an insane moment I wondered whether he was another all-devouring predator like Nettlebrand, but then he grinned. ‘I’m kidding – you’re not talking about cakes or junior Girl Scouts, are you? Issiah told me that kobolds make friends with dragons much more often than humans do, but he’d never met the household brownie type. He used to hang out with a tommyknocker – one of the mining kobolds – but she got homesick for the mines, and she missed the miners leaving out bits of pasty for her. But Issiah said they’re often invisible to humans.’

‘These brownies try to stay unobserved until they’re sure you’re a friend,’ I said. Lobber was lying draped across an armchair, in full feline mode today, but nearer to the size of a lynx than a domestic cat.

We worked on the RS project until lunchtime, finished it off after lunch, and then watched a DVD Ivan had brought. The film seemed to be a very garbled account of the life of Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III; for example, it portrayed the Vikings as at war with the dragons from the start. In fact, according to Hiccup’s own writings, dragons when he was a child were treated like domestic animals: neither respected as friends and equals, as they had been a few generations earlier, nor hunted like enemies. The film conflated Hiccup’s hunting-dragon, Toothless, with his riding-dragon, the Windwalker, showing Toothless as big enough to fly with Hiccup on his back, when at this stage he would have been a very young dragonet, still small enough to ride on Hiccup’s shoulder. Worst of all, it left out one of the most interesting facts about Hiccup: that he spoke fluent Dragonese. Not many of the dragons Hiccup knew seem to have spoken Universal – though he does refer occasionally to dragons who could speak Norse, which probably means that they were speaking Universal and it sounded like Norse to his ears. Still, it wasn’t a bad film on its own terms – a way of imagining what Hiccup’s life might have been like if he had been born into a culture where humans hunted dragons.

When Ivan’s father came to collect him and saw the script we had worked on (obviously I had hidden in my Master’s pocket as soon as we heard the doorbell), he exclaimed, ‘ _Dragons_? Your religion teacher has been teaching you to believe in dragons?’

‘No, of course not – it’s a satire,’ said Ivan hastily. ‘It’s saying, hey, if people are crazy enough to believe in a virgin giving birth, or a dead guy coming back to life, why not dragons?’

‘ _Is_ it so insane, though?’ asked Professor Greenbloom. ‘After all, people thought coelacanths were extinct until someone caught one. In the 18th century, some Europeans assumed duck-billed platypuses were a hoax. Can you think of any reason why dragons shouldn’t exist?’

‘I suppose it’s always possible,’ said Ivan’s father thoughtfully. ‘A while ago, a friend of mine, a biology teacher, emailed me photographs of one of his pupils turning into a werewolf. They were a bit blurred, because he’d had to snap them on his cellphone after his good camera had been stolen, but they looked very lupine. Then again, he’s always been a bit strange, and I heard not long afterwards that he’d been banned from working with children. And digital manipulation is so easy these days, after all. I think I’d have to see a dragon to believe it, wouldn’t you?’

Both men sounded as if they wanted to continue the conversation for some time, but Ivan – who had been listening eagerly over lunch as my Master told him about escaping from a roc’s nest, and Professor Greenbloom told him about the first time he met a fairy, and the Professora and Guinevere talked about their hopes that a pair of pegasi they had met in Greece were likely to begin nesting – now interrupted hastily. ‘Dad, we really need to go – I’ve got stuff I need to get on with. Bye, Ben, see you in Math – on the _second_ floor!’

As Ivan put his coat on, his father said suddenly, ‘What’s _that_?’

‘Oh – it’s an ornament I bought for Gwin, cause she’s cute, and – uh – it’s Valentine’s day in Britain, didn’t you know that?’

Nobody sounded convinced, but, as none of the humans were British by birth, they couldn’t be sure this wasn’t true, as Ivan went on, ‘It’s like they celebrate Mother’s Day three weeks before Easter, instead of in May. Anyway, I saw that blue shell thing in a shop and thought Gwin would like it. You do, don’t you?’

‘Oh – uh, yes, it’s beautiful,’ said Guinevere, sounding flattered and embarrassed and confused – which, after all, is much the way she would have sounded if she had been the sudden recipient of an admirer’s gift.

‘Oh well, I suppose I should be glad you’re not giving Valentines to her brother,’ said Ivan’s father. ‘Well, we’ll be off, then, but – Professor Greenbloom, can I give you my card? I’d love to have the chance to chat for a bit longer, someday.’

After they’d gone, Professor Greenbloom said, ‘Oh well, it’s encouraging to meet an adult whose mind isn’t firmly rusted shut.’

‘But Ivan didn’t want him to know,’ pointed out Miss Guinevere. ‘He didn’t think his dad was the sort of person who could be trusted to hear about dragons.’

‘Maybe he just felt embarrassed,’ suggested the Professor. ‘Or maybe he didn’t think his father would believe him. Not all parents listen to their children – I try to, but I know there have been times when I should have believed you, and didn’t.’

‘I don’t think it’s just that,’ said my Master. ‘What he was saying about werewolves – my foster-father was a biology teacher who was obsessed with finding evidence of vampires and werewolves. If Ivan’s dad is friends with people like Mr Faulwetter, I don’t want him to know about Firedrake, either.’


	8. Chapter 8

Monday 14th September 2015

Bryony is getting much better, and starting to feel impatient over having to go on resting. When Professor Greenbloom and I removed the dressings from her wound today, it looked almost completely healed, but when she tried to fly off the top of the shoebox on the bedside table, she screamed, ‘Owww!’ and began plummeting through the air, flapping urgently with her good wing and rather feebly with the still-healing one, before the Professor caught her and lifted her back into the box. We agreed that she probably needs to do some practice flying from floor level, but that right now, she needed to rest.

As she settled back into the shoebox, I told her about the tiny people in the grass. ‘Oh, the Grass People are all right,’ she said. ‘It’s the Tree People who are bad news. They’ve nearly killed that tree, just in the last few years.’

Bryony sounded more serious than I had ever heard her, but I was less startled by her seriousness than by what she said. ‘ _Killed_ it? Are we talking about tiny people two millimetres high, like the ones in the grass?’

‘That’s right. They breed weevils. They’ve been digging a trench right through the bark of the trunk, using the weevils to gnaw it out. It’ll probably fall down in the next storm.’ She settled back, and said, ‘Anyway, tell me a story.’ So I read to her about how once, long ago, a wasp had gone vegetarian and become the first bee.

Later on, while she was sleeping, I went out in a brief gap between the showers to look at the tree. There were no Grass People out today, but I could see a trench several centimetres deep, around the height of my head, running most of the way around the tree. When I came back inside, I looked up pictures in books and on the internet of what oak trees should look like at this time of year. Most of the ones that came up showed trees still covered in green leaves in September (though admittedly I can’t be sure whether they were all taken in this country), with lots of ripe acorns. The one in the garden doesn’t so much look as if its leaves have all fallen, but as if it didn’t manage to grow many leaves this year at all, let alone bear acorns. But then, it might be a species that doesn’t breed every year.

Tuesday 15th September

It was dry today, so I brought my paper, and a supply of pencil-lead, down to the bottom of the garden. The blond-haired boy was already there when I arrived. When I showed him my picture (along with his own drawing, which I had brought back for comparison), he climbed over the paper to inspect my picture, stood back to inspect it from a distance, and then beamed. Then, encouraged by this evidence that I was capable of grasping abstract concepts, he began teaching me to talk.

‘ _To-by!_ ’ he said, as loudly and clearly as he could, pointing at himself, then at the picture of the tousle-haired boy in his drawing, then the corresponding picture in mine. 

I nodded eagerly, and repeated, copying his pronunciation as accurately as I could, ‘ _To-by!_ ’ I spoke quietly, at about the same volume as his own voice, not raising my voice as I would when speaking to a human. 

‘ _Il-ay-a!_ ’ he said next, pointing at the dark-haired young woman in the pictures.

‘ _Il-ay-a_!’ I repeated.

He said another, two-syllable word, pointing to the pictures of the younger boy. I repeated it.

So, we’d established some words – but were these personal names, or just the words in his language for ‘teenage boy’, ‘teenage girl’, and ‘younger child’? Next, Toby – if that was his name – looked up at the sky, shook his head, and then looked around for something to draw with. I showed him how the lead stick could make marks on paper. He nodded, then took a knife from his belt – I suppose it was a chip of stone, but I couldn’t be sure – and hacked off a piece of lead and drew something with it. A circle – then dark shading all around it, leaving only the circle itself white – then shading in the circle itself, until it was a half-circle, then only a crescent. At each stage in the drawing, he repeated the first syllable of the name he had just used for the boy with the round pale face. Ah, yes – he wanted to show me the moon, but it had been a moonless night, so we would have had no chance of seeing it even in the dark, let alone by day, and certainly not with an overcast sky like this. This was a picture of the moon – and he pointed up at the sky anyway, to see if I understood. ‘ _Moon!_ ’ I repeated this.

Next, he drew a similar circle, with a white centre and black shading around the top, looking like black hair. Then he sketched in the features of his younger friend, giving him a smiling face like the patterns on the face of the moon. Toby pointed to this portrait, saying the name he had said before, then pointed at the moon-picture, then back at the picture of his friend. ‘ _Moon-boy. Moon. Moon-boy!_ ’

I nodded, and repeated them. Moon Boy’s face does look a bit like the full moon. I pointed at myself, and at the drawing of me. ‘Twig-leg,’ I said, trying to speak slowly, as Toby had. 

‘Weeg-leg,’ Toby repeated, doing his best – and my pronunciations of his words were probably just as far off.

I decided to explain the derivation, as he had for Moon Boy. It didn’t seem worth explaining that I had another name which meant ‘fly-leg’ in a different language. I found a smallish twig which had dropped from the tree above us onto the path. I pointed at the piece of wood, and said, ‘twig,’ and then at my leg, and said, ‘leg.’ I pointed at myself and said, ‘Twigleg.’

Toby repeated it, without really understanding. After all, a twig didn’t imply something small and spindly, when, from his point of view, it was a log big enough that he could have carved himself a bedroom in one of the buds. But he did walk over to the twig, touch the bark wonderingly, and point up at the oak tree above us. He said something that presumably meant, ‘ _tree._ ’ His voice sounded so reverent that it might even have had a capital letter: ‘ _The Tree!_ ’

I repeated it. Next, Toby pointed at the piece of wood, saying something that probably meant, ‘ _big hefty branch_ ,’ to him, and then at his own leg, with his own word for ‘ _leg_ ’. He pointed at me. ‘ _Branch-leg?_ ’

I nodded. ‘Twigleg. _Branch-leg._ ’ I suppose introducing myself as Fliegenbein, and showing him a fly or a drawing of a fly, wouldn’t have had the right connotations either, to someone for whom a fly is a large beast to be butchered and shared around the village.

Toby was wondering something else now. He looked up at the tree as if wondering whether to try drawing a picture of something that massive, and decided not to bother. Instead, he pointed at the twig, and then up at the tree. ‘ _Twig comes from Tree._ ’ He gestured at the grass surrounding us, and named it. ‘ _Grass_.’ Then he pointed at the pictures of his friends. ‘ _Ilaya comes from Grass. Moon Boy comes from Grass. Toby_ ’ – he pointed at himself, to make sure I understood, and then upwards for emphasis – ‘ _comes from Tree._ ’

So Toby was one of the evil weevil-herders who were in the process of destroying their own world? He seemed a gentle, thoughtful person – someone who would draw a picture for a giant on the remote chance that the giant was intelligent and capable of communicating. In any case, he had questions of his own.

‘ _Twigleg comes from…?_ ’

I didn’t know whether Toby had ever travelled as far as the house. It would have been a journey of several weeks, quite apart from the risk of being eaten by birds along the way. I didn’t even know how far his eyes could see, apart from the fact that he could draw the moon. But then, that was in the night sky, not hidden between grass stems.

I took the paper and drew a small sketch of the oak tree on one side of the page, an expanse of short vertical lines to represent grass, and then, on the other side, the house. ‘House,’ I said, pointing at it and using the English word, which, after all, sounds fairly similar to the German. ‘ _Tree. Grass. House. Twigleg comes from_ House.’

Toby looked up from where he was standing on the path, which gave more of a clear view to the house than the long grass would. I pointed at the house, and he seemed to follow my gaze, even if he didn’t understand what he was looking at. ‘House,’ he repeated blankly.

I drew a cutaway picture of what the house looked like from the inside, trying to draw it as it looked from a human’s head-level – the way it might look to me if I were human – rather than a study of all the skirting-boards. I drew a table and chairs in the kitchen – I wasn’t sure what to draw of a cooker, other than a big cuboid block with four hot-plates on top of it – comfy armchairs in the living-room, bedrooms upstairs, and my sleeping-place on a table among all the shelves and boxes in the basement.

Toby’s eyes widened, and then he exclaimed a word that was presumably his equivalent of ‘ _house_ ’ or ‘ _home_ ’. He drew ears of grain, with little dwellings hollowed out inside them. Then he drew a cutaway section of what looked like a layer of bark and wood, with an entrance cut into the bark and a home carved into the wood underneath. In that house were what looked like a younger version of Toby, a woman with curly fair hair and earrings, and a bearded man wearing glasses and a beret. ‘ _Grass house,_ ’ he explained, pointing first at his drawing, then at the places where the grasses were plaited together. ‘ _Tree house._ ’ He pointed upwards. ‘___ _house,_ ’ and he pointed in the direction of the house I’d come from, then at my drawing. Seeing that I didn’t understand, he spread his arms as wide as they could go, stretched his hands up above his head, and then gestured along the height of the house wall I had drawn. Evidently, it meant, ‘ _big._ ’ He repeated it. ‘ _Twigleg lives in big house,_ ’ (gesturing again to the house. _‘Ilaya, Moon Boy, live in Grass house,_ ’ pointing to one of the ears of grain in his drawing. ‘ _Toby lives in Grass house,_ ’ pointing to the ear next to it.

‘ _Toby comes from Tree?_ ’ I asked.

Toby looked exasperated. ‘ _Toby COMES from Tree!_ ’ he snapped. ‘ _Toby COMES from Tree house! Toby LIVES in Grass house!_ ’ He looked as if my tactlessness had driven him to the point of tears. He flung down his scrap of lead and climbed back up to his ear of grain.

I realised that, although the people in the house in the Tree were obviously Toby’s parents, he hadn’t said anything about them. Were they dead? As the Tree failed to produce enough acorns, had his parents starved? Or had Toby quarrelled with them and run away, or been thrown out?

I don’t know, but I have a feeling about him rather like the one I have about my Master, and – last Sunday – about Ivan. It isn’t simply friendship. Lots of people are good friends – Lola, the Greenbloom family, even Bryony – without this strange sense of connection. This is the mark of someone who is alone in the world, and has almost given up expecting life to be any other way – and it catches at your heart and won’t let go.

I caught a grasshopper and left it on the path before I went. I don’t want to try to bribe Toby with food, but he’s a hunter, and if he’s given up a day of hunting to talk to me, it seems only fair to recompense him.

When my Master came home from school and asked whether I had seen the Grass People, and I explained what happened, he agreed with me. ‘Yeah, he’s probably an orphan, like us. Sometimes it just hurts too much to think about all that.’

 _Like us_. I hadn’t thought of it like that, but of course he’s right. Does it count as being an orphan if you didn’t have parents in the first place?

‘Do you ever think about your original family?’ I asked.

‘No, I can’t really remember them. They died when I was about three. I remember them clipping me into my car seat to take me to a country park with wolves and lynxes, and tame deer and potbellied pigs who come up to take food from your hand. We were listening to a CD of nursery rhymes in the car, and Mutti and I were singing along, and Vati was telling us to keep quiet because he needed to concentrate on the road. And then suddenly the car wasn’t moving, and Mutti and Vati weren’t saying anything. Some people came to cut the car open to get me out, and they took me to the hospital to check that I was all right, and then took me to an orphanage, and I just thought we were taking a really, really long time to get to see the deer and the potbellied pigs, and I wished Mutti and Vati would come and pick me up soon. But I can’t even remember what they looked like. I suppose they mainly looked like legs, back then.’ He paused, thinking it over. ‘Do you think about your brothers much?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘When I lie down to sleep, and they’re not there beside me. Even though I’ve had three hundred and forty-eight years to get used to it – at least, I _had_ got used to being alone, and then after this last summer of travelling with you and Firedrake and Sorrel, somehow it feels lonely all over again. I suppose, before, I’d stopped noticing that I _was_ lonely.’

‘Yes. You forget that there’s any other way to be.’ He cupped his hand warmly around me. ‘You know, there’s no reason you can’t share a bedroom with the rest of us.’

‘With six brownies curled up on the beds and Bryony trying to re-learn how to fly off the bedside table? I’d never get any sleep.’

‘You could ask Bryony to sprinkle some sleep-dust on you.’

‘I’d rather not.’ I remembered all too well how disorientating waking up with a fairy-dust hangover is. ‘Anyway, I don’t want to risk getting addicted. Uh – _you_ haven’t been doing that, have you?’

‘No, I just like watching them fluttering around before I go to sleep. I like fairies. You’ll get used to them.’

‘Maybe.’ I don’t want to make any sudden decisions. In the meantime, I’ve spent this evening drawing Toby a letter, explaining how my Master and I came to be part of this family. I just hope he comes back to read it.


	9. Chapter 9

Wednesday 16th September 2015

Toby did come back today! Professor Greenbloom lent me a voice-amplifier to offer him. A friend of the Professor had developed it for the use of the smallest grass-fairies, the kind who are around the size of bumble-bees (though Bryony and her friends aren’t much smaller than I am). It would fit neatly into the hand of a fairy that small. I can hold it between a finger and thumb. Toby had to walk right up to it and shout into it.

Still, it did make it easier to make out clearly what he was saying, and I’m getting better at learning his language. From the story I had drawn in a series of panels, we learned each other’s words for father, mother, daughter, son, friend, and, importantly, ‘none’ or ‘not’.

Then Toby took over, drawing his own story. His father, discovering some kind of secret, produced from sap, that would power machinery. A big fat man called Joe Mitch (at least, the drawings implied that he was big compared with Toby, maybe over 2mm tall and nearly 1mm wide – but he might just be ‘big’ in wealth and power) who wanted the secret. Toby’s father refusing – explaining that the Tree was a living creature, that sap was its blood, and that drilling too many sap-wells would kill it. Toby’s parents imprisoned in the ball of mistletoe hanging from one of the branches of the Tree. (He gestured up to where the real mistletoe ball hung). His parents, dead. Toby being left out on a mistletoe berry for the birds to eat, but the berry instead being picked up by a sparrow who was too small to swallow the berry whole, and had left it on the ground.

By now, he looked exhausted from walking around the sheet of paper drawing pictures big enough for me to see them. He was probably getting hungry, too, I thought. ‘ _Hungry?_ ’ I asked, using the word he had used both for the thin, wretched prisoners in the ivy prison, and the bird with its open beak. He nodded, pointing at his mouth, then his stomach. ‘ _Hungry._ ’

I thought of catching a fly to eat, and then wondered how Toby would feel about human food for a change. I took the picture with drawings of the Tree, the Grass, and the House, and added a set of arrows leading from the tree to the house and back. ‘ _Twigleg will return._ ’ I returned soon afterwards with a corner of biscuit spread with peanut butter, broke a section off, and handed it to Toby. He dipped a finger in the peanut butter, tasted it, and his eyes widened. He drew a picture of an acorn, taught me the word ‘acorn’, and then drew a picture of a squirrel galloping past with a nut in its mouth. ‘ _Squirrel-acorn?_ ’

Of course – as I’d seen from the bedroom window, the garden next door is concreted over and doesn’t have any trees, but it does have a bird-feeder, and the squirrels delight in leaping from the fence to the feeder and waggling it to get peanuts out. On the other hand, the tree in this garden is the nearest place with suitable holes to cache the peanuts for winter. I nodded.

‘ _Squirrel-acorn tree?_ ’

Until recently I had never tasted peanuts, but I had read about them centuries earlier, when a Spanish explorer called Bartolome de las Casas described how the people of the Carribean island of Hispaniola ate a kind of nut that grows underground. I drew a sketch of a groundnut plant as I imagined it. It didn’t matter that, as far as I know, they don’t grow in this country. Toby just wanted to know that they existed.

‘ _Squirrel-acorn tree!_ ’ he repeated excitedly. He walked over to the nearest stem of grass, held onto it with one hand, and then pointed at all the rest of the grass surrounding it. ‘ _This grass. Other grasses. This Tree…_ ’ he pointed to the trunk of the oak. ‘ _Other trees!_ ’

I nodded. Toby drew a sketch of what looked like a shelled walnut, next to a peanut and an acorn for comparison, and named it. ‘ _Walnut trees?_ ’ he asked. I nodded again. There might possibly be a walnut tree in this town, but more likely someone was eating nuts from a packet and dropped one. Or someone with a bird-feeder wanted to be really, really kind to the birds, and was accidentally kind to a squirrel, who in turn was accidentally kind to the Tree People when they found a walnut that it had hidden in a broken branch somewhere.

Toby pointed at the picture of his father, and then began drawing again, explaining that his father had written a book speculating that there might be life on other plants, and maybe, somewhere, walnuts grew on trees. People had laughed at such a wild, whimsical fantasy, and now it turned out to be true! Toby was crying as he drew, obviously grieving for his father, but at the same time glad to hear that he had been right. Toby’s father was clearly a remarkable man. I think that he and Professor Greenbloom would have got on very well.

Saturday 19th September

Toby and I have now spent five days exchanging our life stories. My Master carried a folding table down to the area of path we generally sit on, so that it’s possible to sit there even when it rains, and Toby has taken to spending days and nights there, sleeping in an abandoned snail-shell to be out of the way of birds, and drawing pictures late into the evening, and in the morning before I arrive. My Master even lent us his torch, so that I can switch it on once the light starts to fade, and leave it shining through the night for Toby to draw by. Toby still seems to find it baffling that there are giants even bigger than I am, but he understands that Ben is the boy in the picture-story I showed him, and my friend, and an orphan like himself, and he isn’t too worried. All the same, we (humans, brownies, and I) have agreed not to walk off the path, and not to walk anywhere by night, for fear of accidentally squashing someone.

In general, though, the main enemy to Tree People seems to be Tree People. I don’t just mean inadvertently, through unsustainable sap-drilling leading to holes in the foliage-layer and resulting in arboreal warming. From the way Toby tells it, the only things still flourishing on the Tree are violence and oppression.

I thought I knew what suffering was, but Toby seems to have experienced nearly as much horror in the fifteen years of his life as I have in over four hundred. It’s worse for him, in that what he has had to endure is persecution from members of his own species.

It’s not that I’m planning to go pacifist or vegetarian or anything like that. I don’t mind killing to eat, or I don’t have any objection to killing a creature that’s trying to eat me. But I don’t understand how people can kill their own kind. Yes, a dragon-hunter might create a monster that _looked_ like a dragon to kill dragons, but it works only because dragons don’t kill dragons, any more than homunculi would kill their fellow homunculi. But the Tree People are as ferocious and pitiless as humans.

I’m sorry – that was speciesist and unfair. Not all humans are bad, and neither are all Tree people. It’s just that, in both cases, the greedy, ruthless and corrupt are the ones who rise to positions of power.

Or is it simply that there are too many of them? When every known member of your species consists of you and your brothers, there is no point in fighting (though, according to humans’ own legends, that didn’t stop them). But the Tree has a population of – Toby isn’t sure exactly, but over a hundred thousand people, anyway. And when it comes to humans – there are over five hundred thousand humans in Manchester. Sixty-five million humans in the United Kingdom (England, Wales, Scotland, and part of Ireland are one country now, apparently). Five hundred million in the European Union, which seems to be a sort of alliance of European countries. Seven billion humans in the world as a whole. Compared with, for example, perhaps fifty silver dragons left in the world (counting those in the Rim of Heaven, and Firedrake’s group in Scotland – I don’t know how many other dragon species survive, of the many who went into hiding towards the end of Hiccup III’s reign). Only three northern white rhinos (an elderly male, and his daughter and granddaughter). And perhaps only one homunculus.

I’m not writing this to grumble that it’s unfair being an endangered species (though it is), but to try and understand why humans and Tree People behave the way they do. I remember once reading the philosopher Aristotle’s claim that ‘Man is by nature a political animal.’ While Aristotle certainly wasn’t justified in assuming that humans were the _only_ species with language and a complex social structure, I think he was right that, as dragons need to fly in the moonlight and fish need to swim, humans need to live with each other in the city-state, the _polis_. This, he said, needs to be the right size – not somewhere with a ridiculously large population, like a hundred thousand citizens. Probably he considered that a sensible-sized _polis_ would consist of about a thousand people – which most humans today would call a village. 

You can’t be close personal friends with a hundred thousand people, let alone millions or billions of people. It takes a lot of imagination to remember that they _are_ all people, with thoughts and feelings as important as one’s own. If people don’t have enough imagination for this, it can be terribly easy for them to concentrate on caring about just themselves and their immediate families, or, failing that, just themselves and their own careers. In this case, if they don’t become obsessed with trying to create gold, like the alchemist who created me, then they become obsessed with power, like this ‘Joe Mitch’ who had Toby’s parents locked up. After all, if you’re running a weevil-breeding business that controls most of the Tree, then people who complain that your weevils are causing the Tree to crumble away can come to seem like vermin to be disposed of.

Toby says the prison alone contains a thousand prisoners, some genuine criminals – a friend of his used to be a bandit when he was younger, and spent several nightmarish years in prison – but most of them political prisoners, if I’ve understood him correctly.

Nearly every story he has told or drawn for me shows some new horror. A boy who had been his best friend since they were four years old and has now become his deadliest enemy, for reasons he can’t understand. Another friend, a girl called Elisha, who had a job taming the prison governor’s daughter, a ferocious ten-year-old child who battered prisoners to death – and yet Elisha herself had to mistreat prisoners just to convince the governor that she was a normal person! Another boy who left his home on a farm in the Low Branches to look for a well-paid job in the Treetop, and wound up being used as the official punchbag for a gang of weevil-handlers, who were officially permitted to do anything up to torturing him to death. And more, and more. The government blames everything on the Grass People, and sends raiders periodically to kill them – which is why the Grass People initially weren’t happy about letting Toby stay in their territory.

Part of me wants to rescue the Tree People – not just from a few tyrants like Joe Mitch, but from being the kind of people who let someone like Joe Mitch rise to power in the first place, and put up with him. The rest of me can’t really believe that they’re worth rescuing. Except that some of them, like Toby, obviously are, and the rest – probably aren’t much different from me. Just cowardly people trying to survive somehow.

I don’t know what I can do to help, anyway. It takes an extraordinary person – someone like my Master – to love even one thoroughly unlovable person enough for him to want to change. Anyone who could love all these Tree People – not just as a group, but as a hundred thousand individual people – enough to redeem them, would have to be God.

I wish there were books that could tell me what to do. Of course, there are stories about saving a world – but this looks a lot more complicated than catching an inhabited dust mote on a piece of clover. Given that most books are written by humans, and humans have the same kind of troubles as Tree People and haven’t found a solution, it doesn’t seem likely that I can just look up the answer.

I need to learn more of Toby’s language and ask him what he thinks would help. But then, how is he supposed to know, either?


	10. Chapter 10

Sunday 20th September 2015

My Master asked whether he could come with me to say hello to Toby, if he was there. I realised that I had been so obsessed with the Tree People that I hadn’t even remembered that yesterday was a weekend, and that we could have been spending time together. Then I remembered that he had said over breakfast that he and Ivan were going to a place where you could play electric tag and race electric go-karts, and that I was welcome to come but he wasn’t sure whether it was my scene… and that I hadn’t even registered this because I was worried about the Tree People, and especially about Toby. I had slid down the table-leg as soon as breakfast was over, and stayed in the garden until late in the evening. Admittedly, we probably each had an enjoyable day, but I’ve spent nearly a week paying virtually no attention to the person I love most in all the world. I don’t want this to go on.

Anyway, this morning when we went to look for Toby, he wasn’t in the usual place under the folding table. I had walked in front, hoping to reassure him that it was all right before he recognised the sound of a human approaching and ran away, but he wasn’t there at all as I approached. I wondered whether he had already fled to his ear-of-grain home, but then I heard him, in a discussion with some of the Grass People, standing at the mouth of another abandoned snail-shell in the grass, which two Grass People were guarding. I could make out some of what Toby was saying, mainly because he was shouting. Without my knowing every word, it seemed to go along the lines of: ‘ _How dare you call me a Tree? I’m one of you, now. The Tree people hate me! They tried to kill me! But all right, I’ll talk to this old Tree man and find out if he’s an enemy spy. He could be just another outcast like me, you know!_ ’

As Toby and his friend Moon Boy walked up to the guarded shell, and in past the guards, it was obvious that Toby had a life of his own, too. My Master held out his hand so that I could scramble up his sleeve onto his shoulder, and we went back to the house. It was good to be together. Maybe this is how he feels about being on Firedrake’s back?

‘Do you miss Firedrake?’ I asked.

‘All the time. Do you think he’ll have reached Scotland by now?’

‘I don’t know.’ The moon was still only a crescent last night, but this time Firedrake and Maia would have the moon-dew to help them. It had seemed a very long journey, going in the opposite direction, but perhaps Firedrake’s stamina for long-distance flying is improving with practice.

‘I hope the other dragons do agree to leave with him. They really, really need a new home.’

‘Yes.’ I had been turning thoughts over in my mind for days, and hadn’t dared to let them out to anyone – even Toby himself – but now seemed like as good a time as any. ‘Do – do you think people deserve a new home even if they were the ones who destroyed the old one?’

‘But they didn’t, did they? All the books I’d read before I met Firedrake said that dragons were poisonous monsters who turned all the land around them into desert. Well, that might be true of basilisks, but it’s not true of dragons at all, is it? I mean, I know dragon-fire is dangerous to you, but not to most people.’

‘I know. But I wasn’t really talking about the dragons.’ As we went on into the house, I explained what I had been considering. ‘I don’t know whether it might help them, or just make the situation a hundred times worse. I don’t even know whether there are other oak trees around here that don’t already have people living in them. But if they were split up into groups who went off to colonise a hundred new trees – well, some of them might have the sense not to make the same mistakes all over again.’

‘And you don’t know whether they’ll want to leave,’ added my Master.

I hadn’t even thought of that. Do people make major life changes because they want to? Firedrake and Sorrel had gone in search of the Rim of Heaven because the valley where they lived was about to be flooded. My Master had joined them because the derelict factory where he used to live had been demolished. I had gone to spy on them because I was ordered to and it had never occurred to me to say, ‘No.’ I had changed sides because – well, because I wasn’t going to let this boy who had been kind to me get killed, and that was such a fierce certainty in my heart that centuries of knowing that the sole purpose of my existence was to serve Nettlebrand no longer mattered – but it wasn’t exactly a matter of _wanting_. We had come here because, I suppose, when my Master found out that having parents was even a possibility, and specifically that having Barnabas and Vita Greenbloom as parents and Guinevere Greenbloom as a sister was a possibility, he realised that this was what he wanted. But I don’t think he’d even thought about it before, any more than I’d wondered whether it was possible to have a Master whom I loved instead of hating and fearing. 

‘The Tree People can’t go on living in that tree much longer,’ I said. ‘So if they don’t just sit around starving to death, they’ll probably try to invade the lawn, and fight a war of annihilation against the Grass People instead of just skirmishes here and there. But they can’t know whether they want to go and try to domesticate the snails and grubs on new trees, and dig themselves new houses, if most of them don’t even believe there is another tree anywhere in the world. You can’t know what you want until you know what the options are.’

We were still discussing this as we reached the bedroom. Miss Guinevere was there, keeping Bryony company. Bryony has now completely recovered, and, even more importantly, regained her self-confidence in flying. She is even more of a daredevil than Lola, which I didn’t think was possible. She was showing off, looping and diving, pretending to be about to crash into bookshelves or the window-pane and veering off at the last minute, calling to the brownies to catch her. They studiously ignored her, pretending to be asleep, and Bryony, while she flitted past, brushing her wingtips against their fur. She didn’t actually go so far as to pull their whiskers, but when she picked up Robbie’s mouth-harp, he woke in an instant, bounding off the bed to pounce on her, just as Bryony darted up to the ceiling, still holding the instrument.

‘ _Pssshht!_ ’ cursed Robbie. ‘Lobber, can you stretch and…’

‘Can, but I won’t,’ yawned Lobber, opening one eye. ‘Bryony, can you be a love and take that thing away? A _long_ way away?’

‘Liverpool?’ suggested Bryony.

I’d done a little research on this part of England, before other things like learning about the Tree People became more urgent. Liverpool is about thirty miles away. ‘Have you been to Liverpool?’ I asked.

Bryony, still hovering with the mouth-harp – which was much bigger than she was – in her hands, yawned. ‘Yeah, so what?’ She began to sing: ‘ _On the towpath there’s a student with a rucksack on; she wants to try to walk from Leeds to Liverpool, and though she knows she’s s’posed to be in school, they can stuff their rules. With the rain between my shadow and my eyes, painting double rainbows in the skies as I go flying on…_ ’

‘You know,’ Billy said, ‘there’s an old saying: _Go not to the elves for advice, for they will just giggle and sing stupid songs and send you off in the wrong direction._ ’

‘That is totally not fair!’ said Bryony. ‘It’s _pixies_ who send people the wrong way! They’re completely _different_ from fairies!’

‘Really?’ said Billy. ‘Reckon you can prove that by being helpful?’

Bryony pouted, considering. ‘Maybe,’ she said.

‘What’s the furthest you’ve ever flown in one day?’ I asked.

‘Sheffield, I s’pose,’ she said. ‘I didn’t like Sheffield, but there’s a good stretch of moorland in between. There’s a bramble that grows there that tastes completely different from any other bramble in the world, you know.’

‘And – you know the Tree People at the bottom of the garden? Have you seen people like them on any trees anywhere?’

‘Why would I look? Who’d want to find Tree People? I’d rather find a way to lose them!’

‘That’s the point,’ I said. I explained my idea over again: that part of the problem was probably just that there were too many of the Tree People in one place, and that if we took groups of about a thousand people each to colonise new trees, they might not do too much damage. So I wanted to find out whether there were uninhabited oak trees, preferably mature oaks that might bear acorns, and possibly have holes where squirrels hid caches of other nuts, and that were inhabited by a complex ecosystem of different kinds of moss and fungus and minibeasts – but not weevils, obviously.

‘So we can take them away? Yay!’ called Bryony, throwing the mouth-harp up so that it crashed against the ceiling, and fell down just in time for Robbie to catch it. He crouched sulkily on the floor, pulling bent bits back into shape.

Miss Guinevere looked worried. ‘But – won’t that just convince them that they don’t need to look after the Tree, because there are plenty more where it came from?’ she asked.

‘It might,’ I said. ‘That’s why I want to tell them the bad news first. If they remember that they destroyed the Tree, and that they had to leave everything behind them and live in a refugee camp where they had to depend on handouts, and _then_ they hear that there might be a new Tree somewhere, but they’ll have to start rebuilding their civilisations from nothing – well, they might remember, and tell their children and grandchildren about it, and they might remember that next time they might not be so lucky. But I don’t want to tell them until I know whether there are other trees for them, just in case.’

‘Twigleg!’ said Miss Guinevere. ‘You’re in danger of turning into a politician!’

‘I don’t want to be,’ I said. ‘But I want to help Toby, and I can’t really help him without helping everyone on the Tree. If I just rescued him and a few of his friends, he’d always feel guilty about everyone else.’

‘I still think you ought to ask Toby,’ pointed out my Master.

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I want him to find a plan. But if he can’t, and we run out of time, my plan might be better than nothing, and if he thinks my plan is stupid, it might drive him to come up with a better one. Anyway, he can stop me any time he wants.’

‘Really? How?’ asked Miss Guinevere.

‘He can refuse to talk to me any more. If I can’t learn any more of his language, I can’t talk to the rest of the Tree People and tell them anything.’

We (I, my Master, Miss Guinevere, and Bryony) went down to the bottom of the garden to see whether Toby had re-emerged, but he was still in the prison snail-shell. I could hear voices: Toby’s, and what seemed to be the voice of an older man – or at least, it was slightly lower-pitched than Toby’s. The conversation seemed to go roughly as follows:

Old Man: _Why did you desert your parents?_

Toby: _I didn’t! My parents are dead!_

Old Man: _No. They are in prison. I have been in prison with them for the past two years._

Toby: _But – I have the orphan-look in my eyes! Ask any of the Grass People._

Old Man: _You have the orphan-look because your birth parents died. Mr and Mrs Lolness are your adoptive parents. You are an orphan. Your parents are alive._

Toby: _NO-O-O-O!_

I translated this for the benefit of the humans (Bryony had fluttered off by this point to talk to the other fairies).

‘Shall we go out and have a look for some trees?’ suggested Miss Guinevere. ‘We could have a look round some of the parks, and the cemetery. Geography homework this week was all about the tree-planting project round here, so if anyone asks, we’re taking notes for that.’

‘Good idea,’ said my Master. ‘And I need to find something to do that doesn’t cost money.’

‘Doesn’t cost money?’ said Miss Guinevere worriedly. ‘Dad gave you some extra pocket money yesterday, didn’t he?’

‘Yeah, but – well, most of the places Ivan wants to go to cost about £13 each for an hour of having fun, and in the end we found one that cost £13 for all day, only it cost extra for rides on the zip wire, and we got into a stupid argument about it, and – well, it doesn’t matter. I know, it’s stupid. For the last couple of years, I’ve been used to having virtually no money, and just trying to stay warm and dry and not starve, and now I’m complaining about not having enough money to do fun things whenever it isn’t a school day. I’m just being selfish.’

‘Well, most people can’t afford to, but most people grumble about it. You’re just being a normal child instead of the Dragon-Rider, for once. It’s nothing to worry about.’

‘I know, it’s just – mostly, in the orphanage, we didn’t talk about wanting parents. We knew that once you’re past about three years old, families aren’t likely to want you. But if the grown-ups ever tried to get us to discuss what sort of parents we’d want to have, if we could have any family in the world, people always talked about wanting rich parents who would buy them lots of presents and let them eat lots of sweets and stay up as late as they liked. I didn’t. I just said I’d rather live in a tree, on my own. Maybe…’

At that moment, my Master’s phone rang. He pulled it from the pocket of his jeans, and answered in English: ‘Hello, Ivan… Yes, it does,’ – he corrected himself – ‘I am also sorry… Why not? He was being nice, that is all!... I know it not: seventeen, eighteen years old?... Ivan, the most of my friends are older than I! Sorrel is over a hundred years old, Firedrake is nearly two hundred, Twigleg is over four hundred, and I know not how old Lola is, but she is old enough a pilot to be… Yes, Atticus is a human. Well and? Barnabas was my friend, before that my father he was, and he is a human and older than I, also. The grown-up humans are not all bad, know you!... No, I have too much homework today. Goodbye.’ He slammed the lid of the phone down and shoved it into his pocket as if he wanted to lose it forever.

I wanted to ask whether everything was all right, but there was an expression that I had never seen on my Master’s face before, but that he had probably seen on mine many times, and that I had seen on Toby’s a moment before he stormed off. It was the one that said, ‘I’m fed up, and no, I don’t want to talk about it.’ We went out for a walk instead, and looked at trees.

I’m actually writing this on Monday morning, after my Master set off for school and, with any luck, reconciliation with Ivan. I didn’t get round to writing anything up last night, because my diary was in the basement and I spent the night in the bedroom. It was wonderful not to be alone, even with Hob’s snoring and Robbie’s music. 

My Master was worried that if I snuggled onto the pillow next to him, he might squash me if he rolled over in the night. I pointed out that we had slept together enough times when we were travelling, and nothing had happened. I just wanted to be as close as possible – both for my sake, and to make sure he didn’t feel too alone, having had a row with the only other dragon-rider at his school. Well, the only one as far as we know, anyway.

Looking through a book on trees, I think we might have missed any number of oak trees yesterday because we didn’t know they were oaks. Of the dozen or so pictured species described as European (only a few are native to Britain, but many more exist as introduced species), there are oaks which barely have lobed leaves, oaks with thin ragged leaves, oaks with evergreen (and unlobed) leaves; tall thin oaks who try to look like Italian Cypresses and would probably die of embarrassment if anyone realised they were very closely related to the broad, spreading Common Oak. What if there are any number of humans who have secret friendships with dragons, trying to pass themselves off as normal, unremarkable people?


	11. Chapter 11

Tuesday 22nd September 2015

After writing that last entry, I went out to see if I could find Toby. I’m glad I went when I did, or I might have missed him.

When I arrived, he said (as far as I could make out, with the aid of gestures and a few drawings), ‘ _I’m leaving. I have to go back to the Tree. A Tree man came – a friend of my parents. He says my parents are alive. They are in prison. He says the Tree is a disaster zone – totally uninhabitable. The weevils are dead now, but – it’s too late. Joe Mitch forces the prisoners and Grass People to dig the Tree, instead of the weevils. He wants my father to tell him the secret of how to power machinery with sap. He says he’ll rape my mother if my father doesn’t tell him._ ’

I nodded, hoping he could see from my expression that I understood how horrific the situation was. ‘ _Toby, don’t go,_ ’ I said, wondering how to explain my plan. I didn’t even know the word for ‘plan’. ‘ _I have – a secret._ ’

I’m not sure he understood, but he didn’t want to leave until he’d told me the worst. ‘ _Mitch’s right-hand man – is my enemy who was my friend. Leo Blue. My father and Leo’s father were best friends, and now Leo wants to kill me. And he wants to force my friend Elisha to marry him. Branch-leg, I MUST go!_ ’

‘ _Go, yes. This Tree, no. Other trees, yes,_ ’ I said, wondering how I would ever learn enough of Toby’s language to persuade his whole tribe. ‘ _All Tree People – Toby’s parents, friends, Joe Mitch, Elisha, Leo Blue, ALL Tree People – must go HERE._ ’ I gestured to the space under the table. ‘ _Then go away to other trees. Away from this dying Tree. Away from the Grass People. Joe Mitch away from Toby’s parents. Leo Blue away from Elisha._ ’ I gestured with my hands, too, sweeping them wide apart, in case I hadn’t got the word for ‘away from’ right.

Toby looked as if he understood. ‘ _Other trees? Peanut tree? Walnut tree?_ ’ he asked.

‘ _Other acorn-trees,_ ’ I said. I didn’t know whether the Tree People could survive on related kinds of tree, such as chestnuts and beeches. Since, from what Toby had told me, they ate many parts of the tree, milling the leaves for flour, making gummy sweets from the sap, and making buns out of the protein-rich pollen, it seemed safest to ask the fairies to look for oaks.

I had meant to keep all this a secret from Toby himself for now, and let him think – as I meant the rest of the Tree People to think – that they would spend the rest of their lives in some bleak refugee camp, dependent on the charity of the mysterious giants, and surrounded by the hostile Grass People. But Toby looked so desperate that I didn’t know what he might do if I didn’t offer him some hope.

Just to make sure he understood, I drew my idea: people hurrying down from the Tree, assembling under the folding table on the path. Toby looked dubious, gesturing at the grass-stalk housing development at the foot of the Tree. ‘ _Grass People hate Tree People. Tree People kill Grass People. Tree People enslave Grass People,_ ’ he pointed out.

‘ _Enslaved Grass People back to Grass. Tree People AWAY from Grass People,_ ’ I reminded him, and went on drawing. I hoped he could persuade the Grass People that it was in their interests to give the Tree People safe passage. Of course, this meant that the Grass People had to know the full plan as well.

‘ _Other trees – SECRET!_ ’ I said firmly. ‘ _Not secret from Grass People. Secret from Tree People. Tell Grass People – Tree People will go away to other trees. Tell Tree People – Tree People must live HERE. Must live like children, like ant-maggots, like snails with no shells. Three days here. THEN…_ ’

I paused dramatically and started drawing again, pictures of fairies flying in carrying matchboxes, Toby sorting a few people into each box, and the fairies flying off with them to separate trees.

Toby seemed to recognise the fairies, pointing at them and telling me his word for them. To explain, he drew a sketch of a butterfly, told me the word for that, and then applied it to the fairies. ‘ _Butterfly People._ ’

I nodded. ‘ _Butterfly People._ ’ With a butterfly’s attention span, unfortunately. I hope they come back with some useful information soon.

I need more time for everything. More time for the fairies to search out suitable trees. More time to learn the Grass People’s language. More time to learn enough, at least, to ask Toby if he has any better ideas – and to wait for him to think about it. But Toby seems convinced that there isn’t a moment to be lost, and desperate enough to go along with my plan. ‘ _What day?_ ’ he asked.

‘ _Tomorrow,_ ’ I said. ‘ _This night, Toby speaks to Grass People. Tomorrow, Branch-leg speaks to Tree People. This day, Toby teaches Branch-leg WORDS!_ ’

So began the most intense language lesson of my life. We were there until late into the night, snacking on moths who came fluttering to the torch-beam. I had already written, in Tree People language, a rough draft of what I wanted to say. My pictures helped Toby to understand what I really meant, and to put it in more eloquent terms.

I wrote down what he dictated to me, and practised saying it until I was word-perfect. I had just noticed that it was late at night, and was wondering whether Toby would let me borrow the torch to find my way back to the house, and how I would manage to carry it while lowering myself down the stairs to the basement, when I saw a pool of light from a much bigger torch on the path ahead of me.

Professor Greenbloom’s voice spoke. ‘Ben wanted to stay up until you returned,’ he said. ‘It was nearly ten when he agreed to go to bed, and then only if one of the brownies came out to make sure you hadn’t been eaten by a fox.’

‘Brownies?’ I said. I might have missed the pad of stealthy paws, but surely I’d have seen the gleam of catlike eyes in the torchlight?

‘We’re pretty good at not being seen when we don’t want to be,’ said Billy. ‘I’ve been listening to your rehearsal for the past three hours.’

‘It’s now past one in the morning,’ said the Professor. ‘You have to get some sleep – and so should your friend Toby.’ But Toby, of course, had already fled into his snail-shell at the approach of human footsteps.

The Professor gently lifted me up with the hand that wasn’t carrying the torch. ‘Do you want to sleep in the basement, or with Ben again?’ he asked.

‘Uh, basement, please,’ I said, trying not to yawn. I had only just noticed how weary I was. I meant to write up the diary entry last night, but I was already asleep by the time the Professor set me down on my sleeping-table.

In the morning, I woke up in time to see my Master and wish him a good day at school, which he didn’t think was very likely to happen. His friend Ivan is refusing to speak to him because my Master is willing to be friends with Atticus the sixth-former, who, in Ivan’s opinion, is a complete phoney who isn’t (a) a sixth-former, (b) British, or (c) human. Miss Guinevere says she doesn’t think he’s a huldra, because they usually have more trouble hiding their tails – female huldras usually wear long dresses, but if Atticus had a tail, it would surely bulge noticeably out of his jeans. Still, she admitted, that long green coat he wears could hide virtually anything.

When they’d set off for school, I went down to the Tree. Lobber carried me, and set me down just long enough for me to pick up the voice-amplifier from where Toby had left it. I needed Lobber to stretch far enough to hold me up so that I could read to all levels of the Tree, from the grub farmers in the Lower Branches what had once been the sophisticated, luxurious society of the Treetop, the speech Toby and I had prepared:

‘People of the Tree! Your Tree is dying. You cut into its veins when you mined for sap. You killed it when you dug the trench around the Trunk to keep the Grass People out. You silenced the scientists who tried to warn you of what you were doing. You let yourselves be ruled by fear: fear of the Grass People, or fear of your own leaders. Yet you never feared the one thing you should have feared: the death of the Tree itself.

‘If you stay, you will die. You must all leave the Tree. Go to the bark road on the one place where the trench is not cut. Go to the foot of the Tree and we will show you a place to rest. You have behaved as thoughtlessly as little children, and we will feed you and watch over you like little children until you are ready to behave like grown-ups.

‘If you have children, carry them. If you have old or sick people, carry them, too. If you have prisoners, let them go. They have been punished enough. You have all been punished enough. Leave the Tree now.’

I repeated the message, over and over again, not speaking softly from close to as I had with Toby, but shouting from a distance through the voice amplifier, hoping it would reach every twig of the Tree, as Lobber lifted me from one level to the next. I hoped none of the neighbours would notice a huge black cat-like creature standing on his hind paws in the garden and stretching until he was ten metres tall, but, as Billy says, brownies are good at not being noticed. Some species, like knockers and klabautermänner, are actually invisible to humans.

Now we just need to wait for a response. Toby has persuaded his friends among the Grass people to watch the main trunk road and escort refugees to the space under the table. I’ve put some pieces of bread under the table so that any Tree People who do turn up there won’t starve. Toby thinks this is a good idea. He’s acquired a taste for wheat bread, he says, but it doesn’t taste like proper oak-leaf bread rolled in pollen grains, and if the refugees didn’t have any familiar treats like butterfly paté or grub milk, they would soon miss them and want to move on.

I didn’t ask how you milk a grub. I have a feeling I probably don’t want to know.


	12. Chapter 12

Wednesday 23rd September 2015

The first refugees arrived this afternoon – well, the first except the man Toby had been talking to a few days ago, who had now been allowed out of his snail-shell prison to join the refugee camp. He is an old man, with curly white hair, who seems extremely nervous – but then, having lived under a tyrant like Nettlebrand or Joe Mitch tends to have that effect. His name is Pol Colleen, and he’s a scholar who is writing the history of the Tree, Toby told me. He, like Toby’s parents, was a political prisoner, but he had managed to escape somehow, and fled to the Grass People, only to find that they accused him of being a spy. He is very shy, and barely talks, except sometimes to Toby. I like him, and I wish I had time to get to know him better.

These newcomers were country people from the Low Branches, many of whom were friends and neighbours of Toby’s. He hugged them, and cried with joy at seeing them again after so long. ‘ _Mano, you’re looking well! Father Asseldor! Mrs Asseldor! Milo! Lila! Lola!_ ’ For a ridiculous moment I expected to see my friend Lola landing her plane behind us, before I realised it was the name of one of Milo’s sisters. Mano Asseldor was the young man who had fallen on hard times and ended up as official designated victim for Joe Mitch’s weevil-handlers to bully. Toby had helped him escape and get back to his family. From Toby’s stories, I had expected him to be a trembling wreck of a man, devastated by this new trauma when he was barely recovered from the last one. That’s certainly how I’d feel, in his situation. But instead he looked curious, rather impatient, as if wanting to get on with the adventure. He might actually find life more fun as a colonist on a newly discovered tree than working on the peaceful family farm where each year was the same as the one before it.

‘ _Plok! Vigo! Did the Asseldors bring you?_ ’ Ah, this was Vigo Tornett, the old man who had been a robber when he was younger – which probably made him the only one of Toby’s friends who had been in prison for committing an actual crime. He is big (by Tree People standards – he probably weighs as much as 150 micrograms) and so stiff with rheumatism that he can barely walk, and his nephew Plok, a skinny little man who is only 1.5 millimetres tall and weighs perhaps 45 micrograms, surely wouldn’t have had the strength to carry him. Or would he? I don’t find it difficult carrying books that are heavier than I am, even if climbing down shelves with them is tricky, and ants can carry many times their own weight. But the Tornetts would have had to travel several metres from their grub farm, which isn’t easy when carrying an elderly relative. So maybe one of the Asseldors – or several, taking turns – had pulled old Vigo in a hand-cart. Although the Tree People use trained animals – weevils for digging, ants to hunt with, and so on – they don’t seem to have any animals that are suitable for pulling carts.

Two women who looked as if they were of the Grass People stepped forward, the older of them carrying a child in her arms. Toby smiled awkwardly. ‘ _Hello, Mrs Lee. Uh, hello, Elisha…_ ’ and then he was so shocked he forgot to be nervous. ‘ _You’ve brought BERNIE? The prison governor’s psycho kid who beats people to death? WHY?_ ’

‘ _Because she’ll go on beating people, if there’s no-one to tell her it’s wrong_ ’ said Elisha. ‘ _Her father wouldn’t tell her, because he didn’t know that it was wrong, either, and her governesses didn’t dare, or she killed them, too._ ’ Admittedly, I’m guessing at some of that speech – but it is probably approximately what Elisha said. Toby had told me how Elisha’s project of ‘taming’ Bernie had been a ploy to get Bernie to attack some of her father’s own guards, and be badly injured when they fought back, to the point where Bernie had to be put in a wax body-cast and Toby could be smuggled into the prison hidden in another, identical cast, while Elisha’s mother looked after the real Bernie. But perhaps they really had come to care for the little girl, in the years since then? At any rate, Bernie didn’t seem capable of beating anyone up any more. One arm dangled uselessly by her side, and she needed to use the other to walk with a crutch, when Mrs Lee set her down. Clearly, she hadn’t fully recovered from her injuries in the two years since Toby had last encountered her.

The reunions went on for hours, in between people laying out bedding and sampling the strange new bread. The Asseldor family took an assortment of musical instruments from their bags, and all of them except Mano, but joined by Toby, struck up a tune to celebrate being safe and together. Mano, who had never learnt to play an instrument, just sat back and listened, enjoying the music and happy to be with his family and his friends.

Suddenly there was a scream. A pigeon had waddled under the table. I think it was probably more interested in the breadcrumbs than in the Tree People, but I don’t blame them for being frightened. I can’t stand birds myself – not just Nettlebrand’s army of ravens, but any birds. Most of them are big enough to eat me, and the smaller ones at least look as though they want to find out what I taste like. But even a wren could have swallowed a whole family of Tree People without seeing them as more than a light snack.

Even more people screamed as Billy (in cat form) sprang from the bushes on the other side of the path, frightening the pigeon into frenzied flapping until it realised that it needed to come out from under the table before flying off. The crowd began berating Toby for having brought them to this terrible place full of huge monsters (ignoring the fact that he hadn’t). Some of them had noticed me, too. Toby pointed at me, and I backed off. Billy did likewise. Toby explained to them that I was a benevolent sort of giant who had brought the food, and that the furry monsters were under my control and his, and were there only to ward off the birds. I was glad that Billy doesn’t understand Tree People language. Yes, he and the other brownies had agreed to guard the refugees, but they wouldn’t take kindly to being described as under anyone’s control.

All the same, Toby said, as the Grass was full of huge, hungry monsters such as birds, shrews, and frogs, and since the Grass People themselves had every reason to be angry with the Tree People who had slandered, murdered, and enslaved them, it was best to stay here for the time being. Yes, they were safe here. Great Branch-leg would provide: Branch-leg who was merciful even to Tree People.

At least, I think that was the gist of what he was saying. I wish I knew enough of his language to explain that I’m not God, and that it’s blasphemous to let people think I am. But I don’t even know whether the Tree People have a word for ‘God’, or any religious traditions. And if not, how could I explain it? I could tell him that God is the maker of the universe – not just the Tree, but the Grass around it, and all the other trees in the universe. This would probably just lead into discussions about how the Tree grew from an acorn, and whether the universe began with a primordial acorn that sprouted with a Big Crack, and whether this universe could seed other universes. Considering how much I’ve found out in the past month about how out-of-date my own grasp of cosmology is, I don’t think I’m ready for this.

And what if I tried to explain about God as the one who loves and protects this world, who is one and yet many, as Hindus believe that God is Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver, and Shiva the destroyer, or Christians believe in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit? All I could really say is that, just as God works through natural forces of physics and biology to create a universe or a tree, so he works through people to take care of people. In that case, whenever we love each other, we show a small glimpse of God’s nature to each other. Maybe we are all made in the image of God – even someone like me, who was made in the image of a species who believe they are made in the image of God.

So if we all have God-nature, why do all the religious texts talk about dying to self? They sound as though they mean you should hate yourself, hurt yourself, try to destroy yourself – but maybe they don’t. Maybe it is just that we are all seeds of God. When an acorn starts to grow into a shoot that will grow into an oak tree, its shell cracks and it ceases to be an acorn. But that doesn’t mean you can make an acorn grow by crushing it with a mallet. Instead, it needs to fall into soft, fertile loam – probably made of the leaves dropped by its own parent – and be given rain to drink and everything it needs to grow, until it no longer wants to be an acorn because it has something better to be. We can’t torture ourselves into growth. We can only allow ourselves to be nurtured.

I wish I had time to tell the Tree People all this. But they’ll probably work it out for themselves.

Friday 25th September 2015

By now, many of the Tree People have arrived, including powerful men like Joe Mitch – but there is no sign of the prisoners, including Toby’s parents, who had been forced to dig in the crater of wood-pulp that Mitch was hollowing out. He claims that he told all the prisoners they were free to go, and is surprised that they haven’t arrived. Toby suspects that Mitch and his henchmen either cut their throats, or just kept them so short of food that they were too weak to walk. He has had Mitch, and several other powerful people including Bernie’s father and Leo Blue, tied up and imprisoned in the snail-shell, under guard, until the former prisoners and slaves arrive. He goes in personally to feed his prisoners, and to untie some of the ropes for long enough to allow them to relieve themselves.

There is no sign of the fairies. It is pouring with rain, and the brownies, who are still taking it in turns to guard the camp, complain bitterly about it. They want the central heating to be left on so that they can warm themselves up when they come back into the house. The humans say the weather is much too mild for the whole house to need warming, but have compromised by switching on a couple of portable electric heaters in the living-room, so the brownies spend most of their time drying their fur in there.

Saturday 26th September 2015

Bryony flew in late this evening, wet and shivering and complaining that the wing that got injured is aching again. She doesn’t seem to have damaged it further, but was very tired and chilled. We gave her some warm milk and honey and put her to bed in a shoebox near the heater.

Sunday 27th September 2015

The rain stopped briefly this morning. Bryony woke up this morning feeling much better, and wanting to see the Tree People. When Toby told her (through me) about his fears for his parents and the other prisoners, she offered to take him up to look for them. She fluttered up carrying a jam-jar lid containing Toby and a team of volunteers, all of whom had friends or family who had gone missing. Within a few minutes they found the Crater full of bound and gagged prisoners, but it took the volunteers most of the day to untie the prisoners and help them, weak with cold and hunger as they were, over the rim of the jam-jar lid. Bryony could have helped, except that it had started to rain again and she was busy holding her wings over the lid to stop it filling up with water. I wanted to ask Lobber to lift me up to help, but I was afraid of stepping on the people I was trying to rescue, in the slippery mess that the middle of the tree has become. By the time Bryony flew down with the people they had rescued (nearly a thousand of them), she was shivering so badly that she could hardly fly straight, and Miss Guinevere carried her back to the house for another evening of cosseting.

Those of the slaves who are Grass People have been returned to their families, and the rest are being looked after in the camp. Toby says that if they recover from their ordeal, they are to be the ones who decide what happens to Joe Mitch. His parents are still alive at the moment, but very weak.


	13. Chapter 13

Monday 28th September 2015

Freshers’ Week has started, which means that the Professor and Professora have to be at the university to welcome the new first-year students. We need to keep the house locked, as it would look suspicious if the doors were open when there was supposedly no-one at home, but there’s always the brownie-flap, or, for the fairies, the upstairs windows left open a crack.

Two more fairies came back this morning, reporting that they have found plenty of suitable oak trees. So has Bryony, but none of them wants to fly out again until the weather improves. The weather forecast says that we might meet dry weather by Thursday or Friday.

Toby has reported to the rest of the Tree People that the Butterfly People say there are definitely other trees out there, and that some of the trees _might_ be able to support life. The rest of the Tree People are divided between the majority who don’t believe there could be another tree anywhere in the universe, a sizeable minority who want to conquer the natives on all the other trees and teach them to adopt civilised behaviour, and a few who think it would be totally unethical to move to other trees, either because there might already be people living there, or because of the risk of destroying yet another tree as they have this one. After hours of arguing, they agreed to ask the Butterfly People, when the weather clears, to take a small group of scientists on a reconnaissance mission. Toby’s father immediately volunteered to join the group. He is desperately thin, but already looking much healthier than yesterday, probably from the joy of seeing his son alive and well, and the excitement of having more research to do.

The Grass People, after hearing about the horrific conditions the prisoners in the Crater had been forced to work under, have brought presents of dead-nettle nectar and earthworm soup for them and their rescuers. At first, some people were afraid to eat in case the food had been poisoned, but when they saw Toby eagerly taking his share, and helping his parents to eat, they decided to risk tasting it. They seem to be starting to realise that they may have misjudged the Grass People after all. It helped that the dead-nettle nectar apparently tasted not too dissimilar from the honey the Tree People sometimes stole from a bees’ nest in a hollow of the Tree. They hadn’t eaten earthworm soup before, but it was recognisably meat, and tastier than the now rather stale bread I had brought from the house. It smelled delicious, and it was hard to refuse when they offered me some, but I could see that what would be a small sip for me would just about finish off their supplies. The Grass People are very poor to start with, and had struggled to spare this much for the refugees.

Thursday 1st October 2015

Ten fairies set off this morning, each carrying an acorn-cup crewed by a team of scientists with notebooks to write down observations about the ten trees they visit. They don’t really have time to carry out a full survey of each tree, as people are impatient to move in and start digging homes before winter starts.

In the meantime, the humans have been asking all their friends at school and work for matchboxes, claiming it’s for a school art project. This hasn’t been all that successful – apparently the trouble is that most humans don’t actually need to use matches very often, because fewer and fewer people smoke, and those who do mostly use cigarette lighters. But we have accumulated an assortment of small containers, from jam-jar lids to plastic yoghurt-pots and bottle-caps. Professor Greenbloom is grumbling about the way plastic is taking over the world, and has asked the fairies to promise to bring all the containers back once the passengers are off, as most of these objects aren’t at all biodegradable. 

Friday 2nd October 2015

The last of the survey teams was back by this evening. They had each spent two days investigating trees, camping out overnight, and could report that between them they had identified a hundred habitable trees. However, they concluded, as over-population can put too much pressure on an ecosystem, they thought it would be best if groups of only a thousand colonists moved to each tree.

Saturday 3rd October 2015

The Tree People spent today sorting out who would go in which colonist party, and saying goodbye to each other. I had wondered whether to warn them that it was a weekend and it might be better to wait for a weekday, but perhaps leaving tonight isn’t such a bad idea. The weather forecast says that it’s going to pour with rain again from Monday onwards, and this at least gives them Sunday to find sheltered patches. Fortunately, oaks don’t shed their leaves for a while, and a few groups of people are even lucky enough to be going to evergreen holm oaks.

Toby and his family each chose someone – an individual, or a family – to be the leader of a colony, and to choose who else would go with him or her. Some of the people they chose were people they knew, liked, and trusted. I think in other cases Toby just chose leaders who were obviously poor and had been having a hard time, to give them a turn at being the ones in power. I heard Toby’s father murmur to him, ‘Being poor doesn’t prove they’re honest, you know. Joe Mitch started out as a poor Border guard.’

When the leaders were appointed, they settled down to choosing members of their group. Each team took it in turns to choose a new person (or family of up to seven people) before the next team had its turn. Naturally, Toby chose his parents on his first turn. On his second, he asked Elisha and her mother whether they wanted to come with him, or go to the Grass People whom Elisha’s mother had come from. Mrs Lee decided to return to the Grass, to be able to live surrounded by daisies and speedwell once more, but Elisha said, ‘I’ll come with Toby.’ Her mother said, ‘You’ve always known your own mind,’ and they hugged and said goodbye to each other forever.

On their next turn, Toby invited Elisha to choose someone. She chose Bernie Alzan¸ the vicious little daughter of the former prison governor. Toby opened his mouth to protest, but Elisha said, ‘ _You gave me a choice. She’s my choice.’_

‘ _But she’s KILLED people!_ ’

‘ _Because she didn’t know what was a normal way to treat people. She grew up watching what her father did to anyone under his authority, and she did the same, only harder. She needs a friend, and I’m the only friend she’s got._ ’

Toby sighed, and let Bernie join his group.

On the next turn, Bernie said, ‘ _My turn! I choose Daddy!_ ’ She didn’t sound like someone the same age as my Master. Maybe her injuries had damaged her brain. Or maybe she had never been very clever to start with, and that was why she hit people.

‘ _Gus Alzan isn’t your Daddy any more,_ ’ said Elisha. ‘ _A proper Daddy would have taught you not to hit people. If you stay with Daddy, you can’t come with us, and then you’ll never learn how to be friends with people._ ’

‘Oh,’ said Bernie. She considered for a minute, and then sighed. ‘ _Bye-bye, Daddy._ ’

‘ _Bye-bye, my princess,_ ’ said Mr Alzan. ‘ _Be good, my cherub._ ’

The Asseldor family were leading a separate group; much as Toby and Elisha would miss them, they wanted to have good people leading as many groups as possible, rather than clustering them all together. On the last couple of turns, one of the Asseldor daughters had chosen her fiancé, and then he had chosen his parents. On this turn, Mano spoke up. ‘ _Does anyone know who was made Thing after I left?_ ’

A miserable-looking man with an undersized head, a yellow face and very few teeth, shuffled forward. He was one of the slave labourers from the Crater, and had been naked when he first arrived, without even the ragged uniform that the others wore. Somebody had found a spare set of clothes for him, but he seemed to have lost them, and was now standing wrapped in a sheet. Mano Asseldor stared in astonishment. ‘ _ROLOK?_ ’ he exclaimed in astonishment.

The man stared down at the ground, saying nothing. Mano lifted his chin. ‘ _You’re allowed to have your name back now, Mr Rolok,_ ’ he said gently. ‘ _You’re not Thing any more. It’s over. You’re free._ ’

Mr Rolok only whimpered. Mano turned exasperatedly to Toby. ‘ _Was I this much of a wreck when you found me?_ ’ he asked.

‘ _Yes_ ,’ said Toby firmly.

‘ _Son,_ ’ said Mr Asseldor, ‘ _is this Boss Rolok, the one you were telling me about? The foreman? The one who used you as a football, and a darts board?_ ’

‘ _Well, that wasn’t just him,_ ’ explained Mano. ‘ _It was more everybody, really._ ’

Mr Rolok by now was grovelling on the floor. Mano crouched beside him. ‘ _Look at it this way, Rolok,_ ’ he said. ‘ _You and I are the only two people who have ever been Thing and survived. So it’s our job to make sure people don’t treat each other that way in the new place._ ’

‘ _Are the others coming?_ ’ asked Mr Rolok. ‘ _Big Marlon? Rosebond and Flannel? Can we get our own back on them now?_ ’

‘ _No,_ ’ said Mano. ‘ _We’re not taking anyone else from the Enclosure. But in the place where we’re going – it’s going to be tough for everyone. We’ll have to dig new houses from scratch, and there’ll probably be hungry spiders around. The only way the colony is going to survive is if we all help each other and protect each other – if people start bullying each other, we could all die._ ’ He patted the trembling Rolok on the shoulder. ‘ _Come on, let’s see if we can find some clothes that’ll fit you. And if anyone tries to take them from you, he’ll have me and my family to deal with._ ’

So it went on. The teams that were led by the best people seemed to be getting a lot of the worst people, as people decided to forgive old enemies and offer them a fresh start. It was a while before anyone was willing to extend that to the people in the snail-shell prison, but then Toby’s father, Professor Lolness, said, ‘Does anyone mind if I invite Leo Blue?’

‘ _YES!’_ said both Toby and Elisha in unison.

‘ _He betrayed Toby to the hunters!_ ’ said Elisha.

‘ _He’s trying to force Elisha to marry him!_ ’ said Toby.

‘ _And…_ ’ they both continued.

‘ _And he’s a tyrannical dictator._ ’ Professor Lolness concluded. ‘ _But he is also a fifteen-year-old boy who lost his parents at a tragically young age, and he was the son of my best friend. May I go and talk to him?_ ’

Toby shrugged. ‘ _You can try._ ’

Professor Lolness walked over to the snail-shell, and the guards waved him through. A minute later, we heard his voice. ‘ _Leo?_ ’

A boy’s voice answered, not shouting, but level with bitter anger. ‘ _Traitor. You sold the secret of the sap to the Grass People, instead of your own people._ ’

‘ _Leo, you’ve SEEN the Grass People. They hunt with blowpipes – they don’t have farms, they don’t even have secure houses. Do they LOOK as if they possess dangerous technological power. Do they look as if they’d have the money to pay me for secret knowledge?_ ’

‘ _They killed my father._ ’

‘ _Leo,_ ’ Professor Lolness’s voice was gentle, ‘ _people told you that when you were young and distraught and didn’t think to question it. But you’re a young man now, who can think for himself. Do you have any actual evidence that they killed my friend El Blue?_ ’

Silence.

‘ _Did Toby bring you food while you were in here?_ ’ Silence, but there may have been a nod, as Professor Lolness went on, ‘ _I thought so. Did he bring you a meaty soup and a sweet, sugary liquid, these last few days?_ ’

‘ _I wouldn’t taste them! He’s a – I mean, I thought he was – I’m sorry._ ’

‘ _That’s good. Do you think you could come and tell him so, in person?_ ’

‘ _Uh – all right. Wh-what’s going to happen?_ ’

‘ _Well, I think that’s for Toby to decide. But we’re leaving the Grass Country, splitting into several groups, and if you want, and if Toby and Elisha are both willing to forgive you, you can come in our group._ ’

‘ _Wh-what if they don’t want me?_ ’

‘ _Well, you can see if one of the other groups will take you._ ’

Professor Lolness emerged a moment later, with a very frightened-looking Leo, unbound far enough to be able to walk, but with ropes of what looked like spider-silk still pinning his arms to his sides. He apologised to Toby and to Elisha, who warily forgave him and allowed him to join their group, though Toby muttered, ‘ _Dad, just promise me you won’t decide to adopt Joe Mitch, as well!_ ’

But when the groups had all sorted themselves out, and somebody went back into the snail-shell to look for Joe Mitch and try to see whether anyone was willing to take him with them, he was dead. Maybe he had poisoned himself, or maybe he had simply died of fear when he realised that he had gone from being a popular if unscrupulous demagogue to the hated scapegoat which he had always turned other people into – whether individuals who criticised him, like Professor Lolness, or whole groups, like the Grass People.

The first groups of people climbed aboard their matchboxes in time for sunset, while the others waited and said prolonged goodbyes to each other, which got more and more sentimental as the evening wore on. The fairies had arranged to start carrying people to their new homes as soon as it grew dark. Saturday night of Freshers’ Week isn’t such a bad time after all. Locals will be too busy complaining about raucous first-year students (who have been going into town to get drunk every night this week, and are worse than ever now that it’s a weekend) to look up at the sky. If the students themselves, reeling home through some park or cemetery, happen to notice twinkly little creatures in the trees, they’ll assume they just imagined it, and so will everyone else.

It’s nearly midnight now, and the fairies have just left with the last ten matchboxes of people. My Master (who is allowed to stay up late for once, as it’s a weekend) waited with me on the path to watch until it was all over.

‘What do you want to do tomorrow?’ he asked.

‘I haven’t really decided,’ I said. ‘But on Monday…’

‘Yes?’

‘Could I come to school with you?’

‘I thought you’d never ask!’ I could hear his grin in the darkness. ‘You know, my new schoolbag’s got a hole in it already. It’s about at eye-height.’

‘Really?’

‘Maybe you could peep out and decide whether _you_ think Atticus is a huldra.’


End file.
